Search Results for: Madeline

The Mansion is asking for help in supporting their locked-in residents, who are not permitted to see their families, have visitors, go on walks or outings: we have a simple, four-item Amazon Mansion Wish List, a need for masks, a request for the Army Of Good to adopt individual residents and send them cards and letters.

The residents have been confined to the building for several weeks now, and their “quarantine” will last at least a month longer. This is very tough on them. They feel completely cut off from the world around them.

The four items on the wish list are for activities and art supplies: Satin ribbons for $9.98; Pom Poms for art and craft projects for $4.99; speakers for a desktop computer, $12.80, and an Ipad case for $17.99.

The other requests seek only your time and compassion. And that is worth everything.

At the Mansion’s request, we are re-activating our letter and card program. We’re asking that during the virus outbreak, and while the residents are confined to the Mansion, that we each adopt a resident.

You can send e-mails to ([email protected]), write letters or send pictures of your animals or any other subject that is bright and interesting. Please pick one resident. Mansion aides say this is one of the best things we can do for the residents now, they are lonely and stir-crazy and need to hear from the outside world.

The address is The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

The resident names are Ellen, Matt, Gerry, Sylvie, Joanne, Madeline, Brother Peter, Helen, Georgianna, Georgiann, Barbara, Alanna, Linda, Nancy, Annette, Peggie, Becky, Jean, Bert (Roberta), Tim, Ben, John, Jim, Claudia,  and Ruth.

In addition, we could use some help in getting surgical masks for the aides. I’ve found a supplier and ordered 200 masks but they won’t be coming for several weeks. If any of you know how to make masks, please help.

The Mansion is not a medical facility, there are no surgical procedures there, the masks are a guard against infection when people are cloistered – please feel free to make some and send them.

These are not “front line” doctors and nurses tending to patients in hospitals with the coronavirus. They are aides in an assisted care facility who wear the masks to help ward off different kinds of infection. They are asking for them, so I believe we should provide them if we can.

I’ve purchased enough to last a month or so, once they arrive.

The masks should be 100 percent cotton. For more information on making them, check the many how-to-videos on YouTube and thanks.

I’ll continue the special meals program starting today with cupcakes, pies, and muffins from Jean’s Place. Next week, Chinese food or pizza.

Thank you.

I learned early on in my volunteer work that you’ve just got to show up. Our extreme and vulnerable elderly are mostly hidden away from the rest of the world, visitors are few and rare.

Most of America does not want to know about aging, sickness, and death, they want to be entertained and undistracted in the pursuit of money and entertainment. The residents of assisted care facilities don’t often fit into that lifestyle.

These people touch me, for reasons I don’t completely understand but totally accept. We have made their lives better in too many ways to list, and today, showing up with our Rainbow linen to say hello, touched them as much as it did me.

They kept coming up to the window (almost like prisoners, but not prisoners) to see our Rainbow, wave to us, and touch hands through the glass.

Madeline shouted through the window (she doesn’t know my name) “Hey there, thank you for showing up.”

A pleasure. We’re planning meals, a wish list, art supplies,  easels and paint and a lot of visits to the glass. Note the rainbows hurriedly made at the top of the windows.

We delivered our message. We love you, care about  you, and will always show up.

I’m working harder and more thoughtfully on my Mansion Meditation Classes.

I realize they are important to many of the residents; I realize they love meditating, and also that it helps them to navigate a critical and challenging passage of their lives.

I’m a bit surprised but pleased.

Older people are thrown into assisted care; there is usually very little preparation or contemplation given to what is so profound a decision.

Today, seven residents came to my Meditation Class, and I thought it was an exceptionally successful session.  I wanted to share it. I am planning my lessons in more detail and thought. I feel it is making a real difference to some of the residents.

I started by doing breathing exercises with them, inhaling deeply in and then out for as long and deep as is comfortable for them.

I then brought a recording I made on my iPhone  of a train; I called it the “rhythm of a train.”

I asked each resident to think of a “bright spot” in their day, a friend, a memory, a meal, or a walk, whatever came to mind. Then I asked them to think of someone they love, alive or gone.

I asked them to think of happy and pleasant memories, as they breathed in, and as they breathed out. I saw them close their eyes (I asked them to do that) and was pleased to see the smiles come over their faces, one by one.

I then told them we were going to enter a silence for 15 minutes, and I turned on the train soundtrack. They all said they had good memories of riding on a train. I saw that everyone grasped the silence, and I felt them descending into it peacefully. They are getting the idea of meditation.

No right or wrong, just wherever you are at the moment. There are no mistakes in meditation, I said, you are who you are, and that is good enough. You can’t do it wrong if you follow your breath and soul, or even if you don’t.

I closed my eyes as well, and a the end of the train rhythms, I opened my eyes, and so did they. Everyone was awake and smiling; they thanked me again and again. “Thank you so much,” said Nancy, “you can’t imagine how good this makes me feel, and I can do it every day, whenever I want.”

Madeline was delighted, “when I start to get frightened, I can do this, I love the “bright spots,” I have so many in my life, I just can’t always remember to think of them.”

This session felt good. Zinnia has picked up our rhythms, she comes in greets everybody and then lies down and goes to sleep, the doesn’t move a muscle through our silent meditation. What a gift to me, as well.

Things are different now.

My friend’s cancer is spreading and inoperable; she is now considering hospice and the hospital’s own palliative care. It is not curable.

As it turns out, the doctors have been fantastic, they have shown great compassion, honesty, and an openness to consider any good options.

I need to put my past hospital battles and prejudices away; times are changing. I am sorry for the diagnosis but relieved to hear about hospice.

There are not many options.  My friend and her family will decide. It doesn’t look like going home is one of them.

For me, this is now a very different thing. Any complexities or difficulties of the past do not matter; the quirks and difficulties of human beings are put aside and no longer matter.

I put on my Hospice Volunteer hat now, and Zinnia and I will go to work. I am happy to do that, I am good at it, I’ve been doing it for more than a decade,  and I can be helpful.

This is a sorrowful story for my friend, for Maria, for me, for her friends.

I have learned not to be shocked or surprised by life or deaths, the mission now is to work towards what is curiously called a good death, which is a comfortable death, as painless as possible.

And when you are older and live with dogs, death and loss are not strangers.

I fully embrace the hospice idea of Active Listening, an approach that has been profoundly helpful for hospice work and also for the rest of my life.

My job is not to offer hope or false assurances or to offer much of anything more than my ear and the presence of my dog. I am ready, and Zinnia seems born for the role.

Active listening is harder than it sounds. It takes time and patience to learn.  It involves listening with all senses, including eye contact. The patient must know and see that they are being heard.

Interest is conveyed by using both verbal and non-verbal messages – even eye contact, nodding my head, smiling, encouraging the patient to talk. I’m not there to say everything will be fine because it won’t be, and the patient knows it better than anyone. I’m not there to cheer anyone up, that’s Zinnia’s job.

Active listening is not something that just happens (that’s called hearing), Active Listening is a dynamic process in which a conscious decision is made to listen and to understand the message of the speaker.

It is not a conversation; it is the opposite of a discussion in some ways,

We have made contact with our friend’s family, and I hope they will soon be on hand. I agreed to be a  health proxy and will work to carry out my friend’s wishes. Her closest friend also signed, she has to go home tomorrow, she is caring for her mother.

Today, we cleaned up the house, set the thermometer, shoveled some snow, alerted the neighbors, held the mail, found a foster home for the dog. That was hard; it fees like the dismantling of a life. My friend keeps saying she expects to be home on a day or so, no one is lying to her but she isn’t ready to hear it.

I’ll visit my friend tomorrow; she is still struggling to understand what is happening. I think that’s a task for the professionals, but we’ll see.

Things are different now.  I went to the Mansion this afternoon to say hello, Madeline was waiting for me at the door. “It’s about time you showed up,” she said, “we wondered if you were ever coming back.”

I’ve only been away a couple of days, I said. But that can seem like a long time to people at the edge of life.

“Well, good,” she said, “you better be coming back.” You know, I said, it’s good to be missed. I need to get coffee creamers for the Mansion aide Break Room and a medium pink sweatshirt for Burt.

One of the most cherished hours of the week is from one p.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Tuesdays when I go to the Mansion to read stories to the residents.

I came in late this afternoon, and was surprised to find Julie Harlin, the activities director, reading from my book “Saving Simon.”

I know the residents love the story of Simon, and the book I wrote about him.  But I’m shy about reading my own books, and never do it. When I came in, Julie was halfway into one of the chapters, so I picked up where she left off to bake some cookies.

I never read from my own books, I liked it today.

Then I played a story I found online about Africa and a gentle tribe that lives near Capetown, South Africa. I could see they didn’t relate to the story, so I turned it off and asked for their help in training Zinnia.

Getting her to come, to sit, and especially to stay.

Showing them how to pet her without exciting her and timing her while she stayed and lay down. I told them about the rigorous therapy dog certification process, about how much work we still had to do.

I explained about Simon’s life on our farm – too brief – and the long and rich history of donkeys and humans, older even that people and dogs, if you follow cave drawings.

My Mansion readings are popular, the activity room is always full, I’m doing a lot of training with Zinnia in that room, we can close the door and she is tempted and distracted by food, people calling to her and talking to her. I try to keep her focused and still, that was working very well today.

Every day, when I leave, I usually get some applause and many thanks. “Thank you for being here,” said Madeline (she can’t recall my name and calls me ‘Hey, Mister.’

“Thank you for showing up,” she said.

I hear that a lot from the residents, they expect people in their lives to disappear -that almost always happens – and they brace themselves for the hurt. So far, I haven’t hurt them by disappearing, I’m not going anywhere.

For much of my life, I was the king of burnouts. I’ve learned about boundaries.

As for Zinnia, she was great. She stayed in the center, was freed on command, and she circled the room, saying hello, getting kissed and patted.

The residents loved watching her chew on a cow’s ear that I brought, she was flipping it into the air and she was hopping up and down and pouncing on it.

They loved hearing about Simon and they loved watching me work with Zinnia. It is so helpful to be working with the people we are going to be visiting. To Zinnia, they already like family, she is completely at ease in the Mansion.

“This is great,” said Carol, watching Zinnia chew on her cow’s ear, “it’s a story in itself.” And so it was. The reading hour means a lot to me. When I was a kid and we were in trouble, nobody ever showed up, including our parents.

I’m learning that the stories are fine, but what seems to matter is me, is showing up. Hard to accept that, but I see it’s true. I always have a bag of things they have requested – today it was leggings, some socks, two belts, two oversized bras.

So I think this work has become healing for me because unless they throw me out, I will never stop showing up. Two of the Mansion aides came up to me today and shook my hand, and both of them said (my coffee creamers and supplies for the Break Room showed up today) “thank you for taking care of us, we really appreciate it.

And I appreciate them. I love them for what they do every day.

I kept moving, and thanked them over my shoulders, I didn’t want to mist up before my reading time. The aides deserved coffee creamers and more (I’m working on raising money for scrubs for them, I don’t want them buying their own.)

(If you wish to support my work at the Mansion, you can do so via Paypal, [email protected] or Jon Katz, Mansion Fund, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

Thanks.