This week I am in Nashville TN for the Frontiers in Biomedical Imaging Sciences hosted by theVanderbilt Institute of Imaging Sciences in Nashville TN. We learned about how white matter in the brain gradually increases with age but that grey matter increase up until the teenage years and then decreases as a process of pruning of neurons up until the age of 25.

The conference is sponsored by John Gore PhD who was the former Director of MR Research at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven CT where I was a faculty member up until 2000. I was at Vanderbilt two years ago and I felt like I was having a flashback when I rounded a corner in their MR imaging center and heard the British accents of the group that came from the original Yale MR research group.

There were a number of other former Yale Psychiatry at the conference including Brad Peterson and Anissa Abi-Dargham, as well as Jay Giedd from the NIMH. This was the first slide of my presentation “Neuroimaging in PTSD”:

She didn't go down with the ship

“This is the last survivor of the Titanic, who died last week. She was lowered in a mail sack off of the Titanic into a boat to her mother, but her father never got off the boat and died. It was said that because he was in the steerage class that the first class passengers got priority over him (as well as the women and children).

“Years later she was discovered as a survivor of the Titanic and was contacted. She started attending reunions of the survivors of the Titanic. As a researcher of trauma I have always been interested in the fact that survivors of traumas like to gather together and remember, like the survivors of the Oklahoma bombing.”

 And then the next slide was this.

And then the question to the audience was, “Does anyone know what this building is?”

No response.

“It is the Yale University School of Medicine. You might have noticed from the program that many of the speakers, as well as the sponsor of the conference, formerly came from the Yale University School of Medicine. Many of us spent over a decade in that awful place. I think this conference is an example of who survivors of a trauma like to come together to remember.”

(laughter from the audience).

Last night we heard some good music at The Station in “The Gulch” neighborhood of Nashville. I showed the guys a picture from my Treo of the piece of ground where my mother was buried along with 50 other anonymous urns in Tumwater WA.

We have since put a tombstone over the site but we of course don’t know exactly where she is in that 4 x 10 or so square foot space.

I have been overwhelmed with the many responses I have gotten to my prior posts “Brief History of My Mom” which I wrote in three parts since I wrote it last month. I wouldn’t be able to reproduce all of the stories here even if I thought that people were willing to make them public. This adds to the stories I gleaned from the children of my mother’s friends after I contacted them for the first time last year (I was cut off from all contact with my mother’s friends and family after she died).

I cried a lot last year after I found my mom and went through the process of grieving for her that I was denied when I was a child.

I have always had trouble remembering birthdays and I think I never liked my own birthday that much. Today I found myself feeling sad and on reflection remembered that it was my birthday. My father married my step mother three months after the death of my mother, on June 4, 1966, one day before my birthday (which is today) and on my sister Anne’s birthday.

As kids we never had real birthdays. Some years we got a cake with a line through the middle and my sister’s name on one side and my name on the other. We got to have parties only every other year since my step mother said she didn’t have time to do back to back parties. And then we had to organize our own parties anyway. I remember one year I had my much awaited party and put out clues in the yard for a treasure hunt but then the wind came up and blew away all the clues and ruined my party

Of course my parents focusing on their anniversary detracted from our birthdays. I think some years they must have gone away for the weekend but I don’t really remember.

I sent flowers to my sister on her birthday this year. First time ever. I figure after all this time she should get some recognition without having to compete with others.

Have a good day and happy birthday to myself. And in honor of my birthday I give permission to all of you who were left as a sack of bones for curbside pickup to give yourself a break and stop trying to cover up for those who hurt or oppressed you and let yourself feel your own feelings (they are yours, even if “negative”). Oh and I am growing a beard now in protest against those who ask how you are but don’t want to know the answer. And thanks to those who said happy birthday to me on FB. Bye ya’ll.