It was a good first day together for Diane and Sue. Last night, the baby slept next to Diane all night, and this morning, she loved her and held her and put her in her walker and took her to breakfast. The other residents understood her love of the doll and were respectful and and supportive.
Diane kept Sue close by all day, fed her from the bottle, changed her clothes, loved and nurtured her. At dinner, she said she left Sue in the room because she needed to rest.
This bond seems to be taking hold, and Diane seems calmer and more focused, according to the staff. They were very happy about her happiness. I’ll stop in tomorrow for a longer visit before going to Albany to visit with Ali, the soccer team and the RISSE after school students. Thanks so much for your support, this brought much happiness into a difficult life.
A strangely spiritual and evocative bird rescue today, one that brought up the spectre of Gus and his death in a surprising way. Maria was working in her studio today when a very young chickadee on one of his or her first flights sailed right into the glass on the North Side of her studio, hitting it hard and falling to the ground stunned.
Both of our barn cats were out prowling around near the studio and the chickadee would not have lasted long. Maria went outside, picked him up and held him and brought him into the house to show me. Maria is not one to turn away from an animal in need of help.
She had already contacted a friend familiar with bird rescue and we were told to keep the bird warm and in an enclosed space. If he was okay, he would recover and start to move around, if not he would die. She brought a dog crate into the kitchen an placed a long twig in it. She put the chickadee onto the twig, he sat there comfortably, blinking and occasionally shaking his head.
In a half hour, when she checked again, he was moving around the crate, active and alert. She reached in and took him out gently and we went into the back yard. She opened her hands and the chickadee flew off and up into the maple tree. A success.
Maria looked a bit shaken and I asked her what was wrong. She said the thought Gus when she saw the black and white bird. She felt like the bird was a symbol of Gus, some kind of message that everything was okay, there is death and life in the world, and this story had a happy ending.
I knew what she meant, that feeling made sense to me, and once she mentioned it, I felt it also even down to the black and white colors of the bird. It wasn’t that Gus had come back to talk to us, or that he was trying to tell us something. I can’t go that far. But there was symbolism for us in the successful rescue of this little bird, who surely would have perished without our intervention.
In our time with animals, we seen much loss, and much life, from the dogs to the lambs to Simon and Gus. One goes with the other. It was lovely to see this success, this saving of a life. We both did think of Gus, and as the afternoon wore on, I wasn’t 100 per cent sure that we weren’t getting some kind of message.
The morning after, the lessons of Baby Sue and Diane seem to resonate and run deep, I am trying to sort out why the experience was so powerful and also to understand what I can learn from it. It seemed to me I crossed a threshold yesterday, with the help of Diane, Baby Sue and the Hollyanne and the Mansion staff.
Something very powerful and important happened, and I want to make sure I understand what it was.
This true story really resonated with people, it struck a deep chord, it also upended and affirmed some of my notions about dealing with people in elderly care, especially people struggling with memory and the awful alienation and dislocations memory problems can bring.
It offered me new ideas, and spurred me to continue to look for new tools for people stranded on the edge of life, and quite often warehoused and forgotten.
One of the most important lessons I learned was to open myself up to people, including people I once ignored or looked away from or didn’t want to know. Memory loss is a terrifying prospect to a writer, a person whose very existence depends on memory and identity.
At first, in my therapy work, I had to force myself to talk to people with memory loss, I had to steel myself against the fear and discomfort I felt. With the help of Red, I broke through and came to love many of the people I once avoided – they were ghosts, locked away and out of sight.
I have come to know them as loving and individual people. And they loved me back, and it is a pure and affirming love. A big lesson for me. I am better for it.
This came to bear yesterday when I brought a realistic baby doll to Diane at the Mansion. This is a very powerful way to do good, to reach people who seem unreachable, and who have largely been abandoned by our culture, which knows how to keep them alive, but runs from any further responsibility for carnig for them.
In their silence and bewilderment, they are calling out to us, Diane was calling out to us. And she is fortunate enough to live in a place where she is being heard, not just locked away.
Almost everyone who watched this very powerful video of Diane meeting Sue cried, the people in the room, the people online and watching from afar.
So it’s important for me to understand what happened, why this worked and what it means. And how I can help others. I have been working closely with memory impaired patients in recent months. This condition now draws me and fascinates me and stirs my soul. They often seem like mystics to me, living in a different world, yet still close and open.
Diane and Joan have touched my hearts in different ways. To lose memory is to lose identity, and all of the cues, habits and self-awareness of life. Memory patients live in a world apart, they struggle to fit in, they don’t always know who they are, what they love. The known world becomes unfamiliar, it is difficult for them to trust anything they see or hear.
Several minutes after Diane held her new baby in her arms, and named her Sue, I came over to say hello to Sue and ask how she was doing
Diane looked up at me, alarmed, and asked “who is Sue?” I pointed to her and said, “this is sue, this your baby?” Oh, said Diane, relieved. “And where did she come from?” The world is completely different for the memory impaired, there are no familiar signposts, and everyone they meet, it seems, is quite often someone they are meeting for the first time, even if they seem them every day.
Yet they always surprise me, not for what they don’t know, but for what they do know and see.
Diane loves dogs and she loves Red, and she sees him often, but she will never know his name or where he comes from or who I am.
Once in awhile, she asks me if I am bringing him to the Mansion to sell him.
Still, we know one another, she recognizes me in a positive and welcoming way, she knows she has seen Red before and that he visits here. But no one in this world traffics in names, names are dangerous, things to be lost and forgotten. Many memory patients no longer recognize sons and daughter, spouses best friends.
The staff noticed what I also saw, that Diane had lost her bearings, her fixed points. She didn’t seem to fit in anywhere, not in the dining room at meals, or the activity room during activities. She spoke at odd times, didn’t hear what others heard, struggled to follow the protocols of games and puzzles. Other residents were often frustrated with her, and her with them.
She sometimes cried out in frustration as she struggled through the mists of fog.
I am learning that my very understand of language and communications have been upended in this work, and I am understanding that I need to use emotions, eye contact, and gone of voice to talk and understand. Watching Hollyanne, I coldn’t help but she how skillful she was at getting through.
Diane and I talk all of the time, just as Joan and I do, human beings have a remarkable way of connecting with other human beings, if only we can listen and laugh and cry. Joan loved her activity apron, someplace to put her hands, a continuing problem for her.
It was inspired of the very busy and distracted Mansion staff to come up with a possible solution for Diane’s problems – “realistic babies.” None of us knew much about them, I plunged into the research. It was instantly clear that this was something Diane desperately needed.
It focused her instantly, it was clear she needed the responsibility love often entails. Her sense of worth and expectations just mushroomed, right before our eyes. Taking care of the baby. Something to look ahead to a reason to exist.
Sue was a recognizable human object to love, a baby who provoked nurture, important work to do, a way to restore pride and purpose, to stimulate both the mind and the memory. Immediately, Diane was recalling how she cared for her two sons, how she nurtured and raised them.
Watching her, I could see it all coming back to her, nurturing and loving is embedded in her memory, Baby Sue brought it right back to the surface. There are many lessons there.
On the video, she made it clear that she understood love, and also understood what it means to not be loved. She kept reassuring her new baby that she would be loved, that she needed to be loved, that she needed to be heard and seen.
It was apparent right away, of course, that Diane was also revealing herself, talking about her own life and needs and yearnings. In her current life, there are few ways for her to access these needs. Baby Sue offers her a way. I’m eager to see how this plays out over time, whether Diane forgets Baby Sue and her connection with her, or whether it deepens and continues, and offers her a secure and loving task to perform, a way of finding meaning and reasserting identity.
Sue was not just a gift to Diane, but to me as well.
So far, so good. I’ll keep sharing. And thanks again for your support.
My granddaughter Robin is turning ot to be complex and multi-faceted, like all precocious children in Brooklyn, sent me this quite unusual but very appealing video of Robin sitting on a balloon and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle, On A Star,” at the same time.
This will be a great way to start the day, it’s a smile video, you can’t watch it without smiling.
