For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 22, 2021

hard, isn’t it?

Phil walks off laughing as he says, “You’re forgetting things, mom!” The wonderful thing about these reprints from 29 years ago is that it reminds me that jokes about old people showing signs of dementia and memory loss used to be considered funny. You can’t tell jokes like this today. In 1992, it was hilarious. I miss those good, old days.

Let it go. The junk, that is. That’s a huge part of the problem.

I feel you, Mrs Richards. It is hard to give up your lifelong home for a new and smaller and unfamiliar house. You feel the need to self-preserve from the pain by just moving forward to try to stay detached, but it still catches up to you and hits you. You are not being forgetful – you just don’t want to hear it. Kids taking your stuff across Canada and then have a yard sale? You’re never gonna see the stuff you’ve been around with again. With the housing market skyrocketing, we are talking about selling our house for a better and newer home with the fat equity from our current home. I told my husband I am pretty attached to my house. It has been my home and a safe harbor for 12 years – yeah, that’s nothing compared to your 40. If we do sell, I know I will be sad to see this house go to another family.

Our aunt Soph had dementia before she passed away. It was explained to us as not a mental illness, but a physical condition that affects how the brain operates (and that means how the mind operates). I’ve never forgotten how she described it to us, before she lost the ability to speak at all. She said she would be doing something and all of the sudden it was like ‘a black curtain came down in front of me and I forgot how to do it, or even what I was doing’…

It somehow becomes just another house when you don’t live in it anymore.

I feel for the old dear. There ARE many things that I don’t want to remember. :\

Youth is wasted on the Young.

“Yard Sale”, my butt…. It’s all going to the dump.

One of my most poignant memories of my Dad before he died with Alzheimer’s. We were sitting together, surrounded by family and he turned to e and said, “I don’t know who all you people are but I know I love you.” Still brings tears after fifteen years.

There is nothing amusing about a person that is elderly, just remember you will be elderly one day and I hope for your sake you never have a younger person laugh at you.

Thus goes the circle of life. Instead of accommodating wonderful parents who gave their lives raising their children and providing a stable loving home. Now the tables are turned, so to speak, and the parents’ home has been hijacked, those insignificant things that are unimportant to the children but important to the parents are being treated at trash.

Uprooted from their castle of memories, the parents are relegated to a new shelter void of memories – good luck Mom and Dad! Oh yeah, an argument over an old pump organ? Really! Shows where the children’s minds are – themselves not the parents.

As we boomers age into our twilight, old timers disease is more recognizable. “Flower children forever”, no more. …sigh

They sure are niggardly.

Why would you pay for a moving van just to relocate stuff you’re going to sell in a yard sale?

Last panel, Phil under estimates mom, some memories are meant to be forgotten. Though for my mom she had a hard time as she lived through too much bad as a child, we are talking after 1925 when she was born until she moved away from her family, except from her dad.

Sometimes the best part of life is forgetting some things.

Don’t blame you. It’s your life that’s being taken away……

It was easy to give up the kids’ clothes, and their toys, as soon as they grew out of them, right at that time; but now, when I’m going though old stuff in their former rooms, because they still left a lot when they moved out for good, I just can’t make myself to throw it out, even if they said the reason they didn’t take that stuff is because they wanted it thrown out…

So every time they come over, we must make an hour for sorting, and it’s funny watching them because the boxes, or garbage bags, don’t get filled as I hoped…Now they are thinking that their kids will play with something eventually, or use an old piece of clothing for a Halloween costume…

This comic theme makes me want to go through my things and start tossing.

I think it’s poignant, not hilarious. Very typical of Lynn when dealing with serious topics.

Hiring a moving company will pretty well wipe out any money they get for a yard sale. Surprised they don’t just hire an auction company at the current location.

Don’t let your sibling screw it up. We flew back home and put the estate sale in my brother-in-law’s hands. He put someone in charge who made the sale virtually hidden from the public, then that guy’s buddy came in a bought it all up at pennies on the dollar- to sell at his warehouse business across town.

The attitude of “I just don’t want to remember” can be very harmful. Here was an especially sad case of this in a human interest story from a New Jersey newspaper:

Mary Warwick, a 74 year old invalid, pulls the slot machines methodically at Tropworld.

One hour ago, Mary picked up her $198 weekly disability check, at the Atlantic City Rescue Mission, a crowded shelter she calls home. Disability is one of her three meager sources of income. SNAP and social security are the other two.

She sits in front of the slot machine in her wheelchair which she carries all her personal possessions with her, which consists only a knit shawl and a couple of casino change cups. She gambles until her welfare checks are depleted, or to take a break to eat a little something or doze off in her wheelchair, right there on the hubbub of the casino floor.

The reason she gambles, she admits, is on account of losing her family in a bus plunge many years ago. “I hate gambling now,” Mary admits. “I lost a lot of money, but I can’t stop. It makes me feel unconscious. It helps me forget about something I don’t want to remember, my husband and my little girl.”

When you don’t want to move you want to think of other things.

change is hard for us older people. downsizing can be traumatic, especially when having to decide what things you need to do way with that have been a part of your life for decades.