my situation better.” Tom Blake’s opinion: The man is lonely; he went on a dating site. He did not try to hide that he is married and his wife has Alzheimer’s. What he did may not be right in some people’s eyes. One of my male readers was a caregiver to his wife for 12 years. He said, “You need to walk in someone’s shoes to know what it’s like to be an isolated caregiver in a hostile environment before you can criticize them. With Alzheimer’s, you watch your loved one slowly vanish before your eyes and become a total stranger.” The woman entered this relationship knowing the situation. She should have known she was
walking into a minefield. Now, she wants to go visit the wife to see how sick she really is. That is totally wrong and disrespectful. She has no business going there. Next, she worries about how his stepchildren view her. She’s not going to be able to change that either. Probably ever. After all, the ill woman is the children’s mother. So, either she accepts the situation the way it is, stays in the background, and stops worrying so much about herself, or she needs to exit the relationship. I find her motives and dilemma to be her problem. For dating information, previous articles, or to sign up for Tom’s complimentary, weekly e-newsletter, go to www.findingloveafter60.com. See also www.findingloveafter50.com and www. travelafter55.com.
DREAMLAND from page 5 seen his brother in a casket. A few days later his brother died in an accident. Albert Einstein was asked by Edwin Newman, the radio journalist, when it was that Einstein had the initial concept of his theory of relativity. Einstein replied the idea came to him years ago when he was an adolescent in Germany. The dream was particularly memorable, Einstein said. “I knew that I had to understand that dream. You could say, and I would say, that my entire scientific career has been a meditation on that dream.” Einstein did not disclose to Newman the nature of that special dream. In an edition of Scientific American (September 2015), an article states that Einstein “traced his realization of light’s finite speed—the core idea of special relativity—to his teenage daydreams about riding beams of light.” Recalling our dreams becomes less frequent as we age. Recall is most frequent among those aged 1029. For males, the decrease in recall begins in their mid-30s; for females, the decrease begins in their mid-40s. Dream recall drops significantly for both sexes in their mid-50s, and even more for those over 60. Dr. Ernest Hartmann, who died in 2013, spent much of his www.50plusLifePA.com
Greenfield Senior Living
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Personal Care | Adult Day Care professional life trying to determine the significance of dreams and nightmares. He concluded that “after all my years of trying, I do not completely understand dreaming.” If scientists have no answers, the meaning of dreams has been left to the musing of poets and songwriters. English poet Thomas Hood, who died in 1845, expressed his view when he wrote: Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams Unnatural and full of contradictions Yet others of our most romantic schemes Are nothing more than fictions Hood is telling us that our most romantic schemes during wakeful hours can be no more real than dreams during our sleeping hours. But, as children, we knew that, for a song reminds us to “row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” Walt Sonneville, a retired marketresearch analyst, is the author of My 22 Cents’ Worth: The Higher-Valued Opinion of a Senior Citizen and A Musing Moment: Meditative Essays on Life and Learning, books of personalopinion essays, free of partisan and sectarian viewpoints. Contact him at waltsonneville@verizon.net.
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