Following the footsteps of my eldest daughter, I recent began volunteering at a local respite care for people with a late-in-life onset disability. Thinking I was merely going to spend one day a week, four hours that day helping out with the participants, I went with almost no expectations. The first day I watched Ryan with the participants, all of us wearing name tags so that those who attended the program knew not who was volunteering and who was attending. It was a brilliant and kind concept. I watched her chat with people three, sometimes four times her young age. She smiled, they all laughed together. They colored, chatted, played a game of bingo. Exercise time we all laughed as even Ryan, Brett and I struggled to do some of the most simplest activities, like raising our left hand over our head, not our right.
When I walked in I was determined to let Ryan have her space, and Brett and I would have our own paths in the room, our own friends to meet. We were each guided to a table that had a little extra space for new people and more or less, we mingled with those who were there.
I met a woman, not much older than myself, maybe in her early fifties. She was smiling, beautiful in her youth, blond hair, against my gray. The kind of blond that was truly blond, not the out of the bottle kind. Her outfit was casually put together, classy and lovely. She looked as though she was also someone who came every week to volunteer. She wore lovely, expensive chocolate brown corduroys, a beautiful shirt, and on her left hand, her ring finger, a thin band of gold, worn over the years, as it was thinner in some places than others. Obviously, she was married and had been for quite some time. I asked her about children, but she was unsure at the moment I asked.
After speaking to her, and playing a bit of bingo with pictures instead of numbers. After a while it was apparent her role there was a bit different than mine and my daughters. I watched her struggle a bit to pick out the pictures -- it was between the canoe and the motorcycle. She struggled with the differences. There was a few moments I saw in her eyes that she was aware that she knew she was struggling. She had been a therapist for many years, and just judging from the obvious intelligence of our previous conversation, she must have been successful because in the short time we talked, I could tell that she was so very caring or those around her. She was much younger than the other participants at the table by twenty years or so, and perhaps that's what made her nervous. The game was ridiculous in many ways -- there was a picture of an RV and then a picture of a motor home. Honestly, how absurd? Are they not practically the same things for those of us who don't struggle with memory problems? Yet she, and the others, took it in stride, as my daughters and I played along side of the other participants. We didn't' have chips to mark the squares so we used small pieces of puzzles. Initially, we were going to use the side without the pictures on, using the underside of the puzzle pieces. But this addition to the game made her apprehensive, perhaps because she was organized in her previous career and it didn't make sense that they shouldn't all face up, correctly as they were intended. So we carefully turned them upward so the pictures on the puzzle were facing upward, then we went on with the game.
After bingo, we had lunch, and then to end the day there was a musician. A folk singer who came with a guitar, and sang blue grass at the top of his lungs, his fingers moving on those strings quicker than I'd ever seen. We all enjoyed it. The coordinator even convinced a few to get up and dance with her, even those that were a bit shaky on their feet took the opportunity to show their dance steps with this tall, young, blond, sweet woman who not only loved them, but remembered everything about them from the entirety of their names, to their children's names, and their spouses names. The rest of us clapped our hands and moved our feet in our chairs. It was so much fun. We had a couple of participants that would want to wander and someone would get up and go with them, ensuring their safety. This was the end of their day, and they were ready to find their loved ones and go.
Then my friend's husband walked in. I wasn't aware of who he was until he pulled up a chair behind her. He rested his head on her right shoulder, kissed her head and then gently placed his arms around her shoulders so they draped over her like a sweater, keeping her warm. She immediately kissed his forearm and held his hands. They swayed to the music, enjoying the fast pace of the tempo. They whispered to each other and then would laugh, sharing perhaps something from the past, or just enjoying the moment, watching the beautiful, laughing coordinator while her dancing partner shook her own hips about the room and she raised her hands, dancing with free abandonment. The coordinator's dance partner was most likely closer to eighty and having the time of her life, as we all were.
I found myself gazing at my friend and her spouse intriguingly, wanting to know their secrets of the obvious love they still held so deeply for each other. He kissed her on her head. Her day there had come to end, and no doubt they had other things they had yet to accomplish, yet they never rushed out they door. Enjoying the music, their affection, and as their joy was so obvious and continued to shine through.
Honestly, I had a hard time watching, after a few minutes. I wondered how it would have been for my parents, had my mother lived past the 66 years that she did. I questioned whether my own husband and I would hold each other in the loving way this couple did. What was their secret? Did he not get frustrated and emotional as she herself got frustrated, as I saw earlier in the day? Did it not pain him to know that he would lose just a bit of her every day, until she no longer recognized him, nor those around her?
It was obvious they adored each other, and he held her, still, as the music ended. Ultimately, I realized they lived for that moment, with his arms draped around her, her lips on his forearm, and then his hands. I watched as they left, holding hands. They laughed as they exited, and I hoped she would come back. There was so much I could learn from her, so much joy she radiated. I, jealously, hoped for that same unconditional love that I had been so very lucky to have had just a brief glimpse of that afternoon, as his arms held her so very sweetly, still.
When I walked in I was determined to let Ryan have her space, and Brett and I would have our own paths in the room, our own friends to meet. We were each guided to a table that had a little extra space for new people and more or less, we mingled with those who were there.
I met a woman, not much older than myself, maybe in her early fifties. She was smiling, beautiful in her youth, blond hair, against my gray. The kind of blond that was truly blond, not the out of the bottle kind. Her outfit was casually put together, classy and lovely. She looked as though she was also someone who came every week to volunteer. She wore lovely, expensive chocolate brown corduroys, a beautiful shirt, and on her left hand, her ring finger, a thin band of gold, worn over the years, as it was thinner in some places than others. Obviously, she was married and had been for quite some time. I asked her about children, but she was unsure at the moment I asked.
After speaking to her, and playing a bit of bingo with pictures instead of numbers. After a while it was apparent her role there was a bit different than mine and my daughters. I watched her struggle a bit to pick out the pictures -- it was between the canoe and the motorcycle. She struggled with the differences. There was a few moments I saw in her eyes that she was aware that she knew she was struggling. She had been a therapist for many years, and just judging from the obvious intelligence of our previous conversation, she must have been successful because in the short time we talked, I could tell that she was so very caring or those around her. She was much younger than the other participants at the table by twenty years or so, and perhaps that's what made her nervous. The game was ridiculous in many ways -- there was a picture of an RV and then a picture of a motor home. Honestly, how absurd? Are they not practically the same things for those of us who don't struggle with memory problems? Yet she, and the others, took it in stride, as my daughters and I played along side of the other participants. We didn't' have chips to mark the squares so we used small pieces of puzzles. Initially, we were going to use the side without the pictures on, using the underside of the puzzle pieces. But this addition to the game made her apprehensive, perhaps because she was organized in her previous career and it didn't make sense that they shouldn't all face up, correctly as they were intended. So we carefully turned them upward so the pictures on the puzzle were facing upward, then we went on with the game.
After bingo, we had lunch, and then to end the day there was a musician. A folk singer who came with a guitar, and sang blue grass at the top of his lungs, his fingers moving on those strings quicker than I'd ever seen. We all enjoyed it. The coordinator even convinced a few to get up and dance with her, even those that were a bit shaky on their feet took the opportunity to show their dance steps with this tall, young, blond, sweet woman who not only loved them, but remembered everything about them from the entirety of their names, to their children's names, and their spouses names. The rest of us clapped our hands and moved our feet in our chairs. It was so much fun. We had a couple of participants that would want to wander and someone would get up and go with them, ensuring their safety. This was the end of their day, and they were ready to find their loved ones and go.
Then my friend's husband walked in. I wasn't aware of who he was until he pulled up a chair behind her. He rested his head on her right shoulder, kissed her head and then gently placed his arms around her shoulders so they draped over her like a sweater, keeping her warm. She immediately kissed his forearm and held his hands. They swayed to the music, enjoying the fast pace of the tempo. They whispered to each other and then would laugh, sharing perhaps something from the past, or just enjoying the moment, watching the beautiful, laughing coordinator while her dancing partner shook her own hips about the room and she raised her hands, dancing with free abandonment. The coordinator's dance partner was most likely closer to eighty and having the time of her life, as we all were.
I found myself gazing at my friend and her spouse intriguingly, wanting to know their secrets of the obvious love they still held so deeply for each other. He kissed her on her head. Her day there had come to end, and no doubt they had other things they had yet to accomplish, yet they never rushed out they door. Enjoying the music, their affection, and as their joy was so obvious and continued to shine through.
Honestly, I had a hard time watching, after a few minutes. I wondered how it would have been for my parents, had my mother lived past the 66 years that she did. I questioned whether my own husband and I would hold each other in the loving way this couple did. What was their secret? Did he not get frustrated and emotional as she herself got frustrated, as I saw earlier in the day? Did it not pain him to know that he would lose just a bit of her every day, until she no longer recognized him, nor those around her?
It was obvious they adored each other, and he held her, still, as the music ended. Ultimately, I realized they lived for that moment, with his arms draped around her, her lips on his forearm, and then his hands. I watched as they left, holding hands. They laughed as they exited, and I hoped she would come back. There was so much I could learn from her, so much joy she radiated. I, jealously, hoped for that same unconditional love that I had been so very lucky to have had just a brief glimpse of that afternoon, as his arms held her so very sweetly, still.
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