Helen

This is a piece that I wrote last year after spending the day with one of the residents at Wynwood. I'm heading over next week to discuss scheduling for my interviews, but this is sort of how I hope to have my interviews turn out.

Enjoy!

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Helen, age 93. Rather, birthdate: “May 2, 1916.” I went to bring her cane and ended spending my whole afternoon with her. She’s starting to lose her memory in possibly the worst way imaginable: she is painfully aware of everything. She tries her hardest to resist, but she is only delaying the inevitable.

I came to her room and cracked open the door, recalling the secretary’s words: “She’s probably out of her room.” Much to my surprise, I found her on a stool in the middle of the room, just sitting there. I wasn’t entirely prepared to see her, and although I have been with the “old people” long enough for them to not make me nervous, I was taken aback for a second. The stark white walls seemed rather harsh to me, not adorned with loving family photographs or pictures of Helen at a younger age. All I saw was a stuffed raccoon and a ceramic cat near the television set. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a newspaper article on tattered yellow paper with writing in pencil that informed me it had been published in 1989. “Senior citizen swims 100 miles,” it read. And sure enough, there was a photograph of the same woman now sitting, slightly stooped over, on a stool in front of me.

“Oh, my cane! I keep forgetting it,” Helen says with a shy smile. “Thank you for bringing it to me. What’s that on your shirt?”

“It’s a French advertisement,” I explain. She tries to translate it and explains that she took French, Spanish, and German (as she is German, but wasn’t terribly good at the language, much to the chagrin of her family) in high school. She tells me that she is waiting for her brother, whose name she cannot recall, to bring her something, but she is not sure if she is thinking of the right day. After several minutes of struggling, she finally produces a name: Neal. She asks if the weather is nice outside, and I say that it’s perfect. We decide to head downstairs and sit on the porch.

As we’re on our way down, we run into a woman in a wheelchair and her daughter or granddaughter pushing her around. “She’s very nice,” she says, referring to me. Then is the first time she asks my name. I tell her, and then we get off the elevator to go outside. She says she is thirsty, so we get a drink at the water fountain. Then we go out to the porch and enjoy the perfect summer weather. She brings up again that she is looking for her brother, and she has trouble producing a name.

“Neal?” I suggest.

“You know him?” she seems shocked.

“Oh, no, you just mentioned him upstairs,” I explain. She is visibly disappointed, and tells me that she has lost touch with him. She expresses frustration at her not going outside earlier as well as her lack of activity.

“I used to be so active,” she remarks. She tells me how she used to skate and used to be so active, but since she has been getting older, she hasn’t done anything near that. She asks me how old she is for the third time, and I tell her. She tells me that her throat feels dry, and I ask if she would like a cup of water. “No,” she tells me. “I think what I really want is an ice cream cone. I know that would be impossible, but it sounds perfect just about now.”

“Let me run in and see if I can get you one,” I suggest. I can usually get into the kitchen, and I know where the ice cream is. Her eyes light up with the prospect of getting a treat for once, being treated specially. The kitchen is locked, so I go to the director’s. She calls the kitchen and asks if they have individual ice cream servings, which they don’t. I return and tell Helen that she might be able to get ice cream when the Volunteer Coordinator returns, but I can tell again she is let down. I almost feel like running back to get something for her from our home.

Later, she complains of sitting too long and we decide to take a walk to see the duck pond. She starts off a bit stiff, but after a while, gripping my hand tightly, she gets up a fairly good pace. She struggles a bit when we reach the grassy area we must step over to reach the bench, but makes it through fairly easily. We sit on the bench and talk for a while. I discover that she was secretary for a Streetlight Company in Romeo, MI and that she traveled extensively in her younger days. As I suggest we start heading back, we notice that of the five ducks we had been watching, three had come up to us and were less than ten feet away. Once again, her face lit up.

We walked back, her stiff at first, gradually easing into a rhythm, and I left her at the elevators on your way up to dinner. The look in her eyes was enough to let me know I’d helped make her day better, that she wasn’t getting the individual attention I felt all the residents deserved. We exchanged goodbyes, I told her I would see her later, and once more, for the third time, she asked for my name.