“This morning I was trying to tell her that when I was getting ready to come to see her I had thought I was running late, but when I got there I was actually a litle earlier than usual. She looked at me and said, ‘What language are you speaking?’ I guess she couldn’t follow what I was saying, or something.”
Beth, the wife of one of my college friends, is in an institution. Her husband, my friend Keith, said, ”Some of them just walk endlessly through the halls. One of them takes cushions off the chairs in the hallways, and moves them around. Some of the residents don’t make any sense when they try to talk to you. Some are just silent. There’s one little German lady in Beth’s ‘neighborhood’ who talks both English and German. Mostly she just says, ‘Wonderbar’ to everything. One of the care partners was going to take her to the bathroom. She said, ‘Wonderbar.’ The first thing I noticed about her was that at lunch she picks the food up with her fingers. She almost never uses a fork or spoon. The care partners avoid serving her anything that she can’t pick up. (That’s not unusual. Beth often picks up vegetables or pieces of meat with her fingers. Or she will eat her meat with a spoon, and then try to eat pudding with a fork.” Beth uses a rollator to help her walk. A couple of times when I was walking in the hall with Beth and her rollator this little German was also in the hall. She just took hold of my hand and started walking along with us. Today when I came into the dining room, she was sitting at one of the tables. She held out her hand to me as I passed her. So I shook her hand, and I said ‘Wonderbar,’ That will give you some idea how my life has been going.
Pam Devlin is one of my favorite people in the world. I met her about thirty years ago when she was the vice-principal at Elsie Allen High School and John was a freshman. She later became a high school principal at Maria Carrillo high school in Santa Rosa. We reconnected through Facebook. I saw her last winter in Cotati where we both attended a celebration of a mutual friend, Joel Kammer, who died of Alzheimer’s.
She explained to me at the time that her husband Joe, a former teacher, also suffered from dementia. Here are two of her FB posts.
Not everybody has dementia. An email from my cousin Donald. We’re both 78.
“well, last week i had a thyroid biopsy,
two skin biopsies, and a crown bridge
tooth thingy…i still spend my nights
dreaming of ditties, but no longer scribble
them down, because wrassling the
fifty thousand loops and samples
into coexisting with the five piece
horn section is just too dang
exhausting… so the current
stash of 72 music vids that
are online will have to suffice
(whether on REVERBNATION
or YOUTUBE)…d.funked out”
Something about those “Golden Years”