Saturday, June 6, 2015

"Psychology 101" or maybe "Dysfunctional Families 102"

I had a very disquieting and excessively long phone conversation yesterday with one of my two sisters, ostensibly about our youngest sibling, "baby sister", now 74, and suffering advancing deterioration resulting from progressing 'MS'.

Talking with this middle sister always makes me feel like some kind of amateur traveling psychiatrist who has unexpectedly found himself in a situation where normal reality is thrust into some weird kind of machine which accepts actual reality into its intake, but spits it back out twisted, bent and curled and re-flavored to suit a whole other set of parameters only found in an alternate universe somewhere.

This conversation never sticks to its main topic, but always degenerates into a recital of past events, altered as above, taking far too long and being much too repetitive. I always come away from such an experience feeling like I've somehow miraculously survived being sucked into a tornado and mercifully spit out, relatively unharmed, before being turned into a babbling idiot.

And I must add here, I always thank God that I have escaped from it, and did survive the experience.


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