Quantum mechanics continues to ruin my life

Mom is going on and on and on and on about a late family friend. She's going on repetitively, too, the same way she goes on about our late cat ("she was such a good cat, and I'll never forgive myself for feeding her canned food. She wouldn't let me leave her side when she was dying. I had to go to the bathroom, and she just screamed. Someone rang the doorbell to try to sell us compact fluorescents, and I was so worried that I couldn't get rid of her to be with the cat.") And so on. She probably goes through this every day.

I know that learning patience--special mom patience, special mom-Alzheimer's patience--is changing the way I listen to her. You'll recall that I've had good reason over the years to tune out my mother (and to tell her that she's already told me something), and I've become very good at it. But I have to listen in the 'because she's talking' sense, which means moving away from the 'I already have this information and I don't need you to repeat it' model. The issue is when they overlap in the realm of, "I wouldn't mind your repeating this except I don't think it's good for you anyway."

Anyway, I was reading my xmas present (dad gave this to me on xmas because he has taken to teaching me about electricity):

My Xmas present

I've been taking it one section at a time, just got to magnetism. Dad disclaimed when he gave me the book that it was 'primitive' but still helpful. I've been remarking, as I go along, that I'm pretty sure some of it is quite wrong (but the book is admittedly helpful nonetheless).

So I made one such remark as I was reading ("um, I don't think electrons are the smallest particles of matter, but yeah, the book was written in the 60s"), which led my dad to think of quantum mechanics and ask me if I remembered this late family friend and her son, who studied quantum mechanics. And this, in turn, got mom going on and on and on and on about said friend and her son, with the usual horrible combination that makes mom's stories unpleasant to listen to: tragedy and smearing. The friend was a (Polish) Holocaust survivor who'd seen her parents shot in front of her as she was hidden by another family; she didn't know a lot of people here, and mom was one of the first people called when she passed away. You don't need more details; you only need to know that for the next thirty minutes, mom would repeat a series of thoughts about how (1) this poor woman saw her parents shot in front of her (true); (2) her sons had practically abandoned her (not true but mom loves that $hit, defaults to it); and (3) mom had at one point given her something "valuable" (it turned out to be some sort of wheeled shopping device) that those bastards sold, how could they (true, according to dad, and perhaps mildly annoying as well as not cool, but isn't it time to let it go?). On repeat: parents shot, she had no one, we loaned her something--what was it?, that poor woman--can you imagine that kind of childhood, oh and her sons just didn't have time for her, we loaned them something or other that they ended up selling... and so on, for the next half-hour. Actually, she is still going. "Of course one doesn't forget easily when one sees one parents' shot. When we would take her with us on day trips, she was too shy to eat. When she died, the police had my phone number, not that of either son."

So, what is the most appropriate response? If we were to build a Venn diagram of why mom's oft-repeated stories grate on me, there would be one circle for "I've already heard this" and another for "I didn't like it the first time OR it was sad enough the first time, but more importantly, it doesn't serve you to repeat it. LET IT GO."

I mean, I'm not trying to be insensitive. I essentially have a master's degree in people's suffering. I don't dehumanize it and it doesn't get lost in its magnitude, but I can't let myself dwell indefinitely on these things. There is way too much shit in the world today, much less in the history of the world, to let it paralyze you.

And you sure as hell don't need to dwell on stuff not returned to you years ago, when you can't even remember what that stuff is. I know: easy for me to say; I didn't grow up deprived of stuff. Nevertheless...

Back to our Venn diagram: in terms of adapting my listening style to mom's Alzheimer's, I can manage--i.e., get over myself--as far as the first circle is concerned. It's the overlap with the second circle that makes it hard to keep quiet. It's that second circle that impels me to say, "you've already told me that."