Twenty Five Cents A Day

(A true story)

          I go to the nursing home for an hour on Mondays. When I get there, I turn off my car and sit for a few moments. I need to clear myself so I can focus on them and let them feel God’s love flowing through me. After I check in with the activities director, I go down the hall to Unit 1 at one end of the building. I always wear red — a sweater, a shirt, a turtleneck when it’s cold. I think it may help them recognize me, though I don’t know. They’re lost, my friends in Unit 1, lost to Alzheimer’s or some other dementia.

           There’s a short entrance hallway inside the unit that opens to a sitting area with the nurses’ station on the left. The hallway to the patients’ rooms runs through the center of the building just beyond the sitting area. Most of the patients don’t know where they are. Some think they’re still living on the farm they grew up on, some think their long dead brother is coming to visit them, and some don’t seem to think anything.

            The ones who have been here for several months seem to recognize me now, though they don’t know my name. For long periods, they’re the same each week when I come in. Then suddenly, the next week, they’re different – angry or sad or more confused than normal. Sometimes they’re at the edge of death. That’s what happens with this terrible disease, it never stops, never gets better, just continues on its relentless, erratic journey of destruction.

One of the saddest situations involved an elderly woman with advanced dementia. She would sit in her wheelchair directly in front of the nurse’s station. Every ten minutes, she would ask the nurse to call her husband, “Would you please call Homer Watson?” in a loud voice. Over and over again. Eventually, the nurse would tell her that her husband had gone to heaven. That would silence the woman for a short time, then the questions would start again. Yes, it was relentless for the nurses, but the poor woman had to experience the pain of losing her husband over and over again. There are no winners in this unit, except for the disease.

            I walk around the unit and greet everyone. I tell them it’s the day when we’re going to sing hymns and that I’ll be back to take them. I make it a point to touch everyone in the unit – on the shoulder or on the arm. I’ve read that some people in nursing homes have no visitors, so they never experience the touch of another human, except for the aides who care for them.

Joyce smiles and greets me with some comment about how I say hello to all the women. Her left arm and leg are paralyzed. Next in the hallway is Maddie, light-skinned, 94 years old with no teeth. She’s a sweet, quiet woman who always asks me to lean over so she can kiss my cheek. She smiles when I tell her we’re going singing today.

            I cross the hall where Margaret sits in her reclined wheelchair. When I first came, she could walk by herself while holding the railing or my hand. Now she can’t. She’s increasingly buried in what I hope are nightmares, not memories. She will yell and curse at someone or wail about a child being taken from her. Once, she cried so hard her whole face was wet with tears.

I tell her we’re going to sing hymns. When she can understand me, she’ll say, “Good, I like that” and then “Okay”. Then I wheel her to the main dining room along with the other residents to sing some old timey church hymns like “Amazing Grace”. Two women from my church lead us, one plays the piano, the other helps the residents find their place in the music sheet we give them. Some of residents can sing quite well, but Margaret is often off-key, sometimes off-tune as well. She only remembers clusters of the words, which she sings over and over. She learned these songs a long time ago. “Preacher taught me that one,” she says.

            We sing songs for forty minutes. When we’re finished, we take our people back to their unit’s small dining room for lunch. Then we go back outside to our homes and our loved ones.

            It is not much, what we do, but it is something. That’s what I tell myself to help fight off the guilt I have for not doing more to help others. I’m comforted by a quotation I found the other day:

“We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking a $1,000 bill and laying it on the table — ‘Here’s my life, Lord, I’m giving it all.’ But the reality for most of us is that he sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $1,000 for quarters. We go through life putting out 25 cents here and 50 cents there….Usually giving our life to Christ isn’t glorious. It’s done in all those little acts of love, 25 cents at a time.” [Frederick Craddock, cited in Leadership, Fall 1984]