This book contains transformative tales of companionship between nursing home residents and volunteers. Woven through the narratives are ten useful building blocks for forging bonds with people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. The stories offer compelling portraits of people such as:
· Annie Mae, who as a child defied her mother and cut a hole in her feed sack dress
· Hugh, who caught a rattlesnake with his shoelace to make $10
· Nora and Bebo, whose birthday wishes were immediately granted
· Bob, the quadriplegic who went skydiving
· Moses, the first Black welder in North Florida
Heartwarming, poignant, humorous, instructive, and inspiring, the stories will appeal to those who visit with or care for elders. More broadly, this is a book about forming friendships in unexpected ways. It testifies to the healing power of communication, music, laughter, celebrating, and just being present with someone. Come discover the power of ageless friendship!
Authors Steve and Allison Blay were fresh out of college when a short stint as nursing home volunteers became an unexpected lifelong passion. Nearly twenty-five years later, they have trained hundreds of volunteers to visit residents of nursing homes.
This book contains transformative tales of companionship between nursing home residents and volunteers. Woven through the narratives are ten useful building blocks for forging bonds with people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds. The stories offer compelling portraits of people such as:
· Annie Mae, who as a child defied her mother and cut a hole in her feed sack dress
· Hugh, who caught a rattlesnake with his shoelace to make $10
· Nora and Bebo, whose birthday wishes were immediately granted
· Bob, the quadriplegic who went skydiving
· Moses, the first Black welder in North Florida
Heartwarming, poignant, humorous, instructive, and inspiring, the stories will appeal to those who visit with or care for elders. More broadly, this is a book about forming friendships in unexpected ways. It testifies to the healing power of communication, music, laughter, celebrating, and just being present with someone. Come discover the power of ageless friendship!
Authors Steve and Allison Blay were fresh out of college when a short stint as nursing home volunteers became an unexpected lifelong passion. Nearly twenty-five years later, they have trained hundreds of volunteers to visit residents of nursing homes.
Being present is the first and most fundamental building block in any friendship or relationship. Just being there is an act of love. It is important to spend time with our children . . . to visit with parents and grandparents . . . to be with our friends in moments of celebration and sorrow.
Our loving presence can make a meaningful difference at the nursing home as well. We see it in the eyes of those we visit from the moment we walk through the door. Our presence matters to them before we even say a word. In particular, people with communication barriers may benefit from someone just being there, willing to be present without words.
What does it mean to be present with someone? Offering our time and attention, our smile and sympathy, and our eye contact and listening ears are simple gestures that any of us can do—simple, but not always easy. We may have a thousand other demands on our time and energy and it may feel awkward or uncomfortable at first, but if we can overcome that and make the effort to be present with others, it can have a powerful impact on their lives and ours.
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True Colors—Allison’s Story
Annie Mae and I became friends over coloring books.
I write this story through the lens of time and memory. I was just twenty-two years old when we became friends. She was one of my first close friends at the nursing home, and to this day, her place in my heart endures.
I met Annie Mae because she and her friend Sally always liked to sit right across from the front doors of the facility, watching the people come in and out through the wide, glass double doors. Annie Mae always wore colorful knitted caps and had brightly painted fingernails. Sally loved to accompany us on a red tambourine whenever we came out to play music. What they had most in common were their sweet smiles and their easy laughter. Right from the start they invited me into their joyful way of being.
When Annie Mae and Sally weren’t sitting near the front door, they were in the dayroom, usually coloring. I used to love to color as a child, so I was glad to pull up a chair to the long, beat-up folding table and color with them. This was way before the era of adult coloring books when coloring became acceptable for grown-ups, so the books we colored were children’s books. It was still considered child’s play, but we didn’t care. Sally and Annie Mae shared an essential innocence which allowed me to display my own.
Annie Mae’s hands were twisted with arthritis, and so after coloring for a while, she would get tired. “You finish,” she would say, pushing her coloring book towards me. So, I would continue working on her page, always consulting her about which colors she wanted where and any other touches she wanted me to add.
While I colored, she would sometimes tell jokes she remembered from when she was a child or share sayings like “The old gray goose never gets so gray what some old gray gander won’t come her way.” Then she would smile mischievously, and I took it to mean that though she had never married, she was not out of the running yet.
She also often told stories from her childhood, such as about the time she had made a big mess on her mama’s cooking space as she tried to make “tea cakes” out of flour and water. Then there was the time her mama made a dress out of feed sacks for her. In those days, feed for farm animals often came in brightly colored cotton sacks, and those who could not afford material for clothing would sometimes make shirts and dresses out of them. However, Annie Mae hated her “feed-sack dress”—so much so that, as she put it, “I took some scissors out of the kitchen and cut a big hole in it. When Mama found it, she put a big ol’ patch on it and made me wear it to school for three whole days!” Annie Mae always ended these stories with her characteristic chuckle.
About a year or two into our friendship, and after Sally had died, Annie Mae grew tired of coloring, so we shifted to reading together. Two or three days a week, she and I would find a place to sit, usually on the front porch if the weather was decent. We would watch the cars go by and chat a bit, and then she would let me read to her. Mostly we read books that were intended for children, for that was what we liked best, and it fit the friendship we had built on simple joys.
We started with Lois Lenski’s Strawberry Girl, because it most closely reflected Annie Mae’s own childhood experience in 1920s Florida. She especially appreciated the chapter about sugarcane grinding and candy pulling. When the cane syrup was boiled down exactly right, it could be made into a soft, gooey candy. Children would grease their hands and pull it out into long strands that hardened and could then be cut into pieces of candy. “Yep, that’s how we would do it,” she would say.
After Strawberry Girl we read through the whole Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. The connections with her life experience were not as strong here, as the books were set in an earlier time and a faraway place, but still, she could relate to activities like churning butter, smoking meat, gardening, sewing, and hunting.
From there we moved on to works by Marjorie Kinnan Rawling: her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Yearling, and parts of her memoir, Cross Creek, which is set in a small town by the same name, not far from our hometown. Annie Mae had vague memories of meeting “Ms. Rawlin’s” because some of her family, the Townsends, lived in Cross Creek and appear in a chapter of that book called “The Pound Party.” The mother and father mentioned in that chapter were Annie Mae’s aunt and uncle, and the kids were her first cousins. As time went on, Steve and I have met many of the Townsends and have even been invited to some of their family gatherings. Our friendship with them continues to this day.
Sometimes Annie Mae and I did not feel like reading together or even talking. We would just sit together in the sunshine on the front porch and watch the cars go by and the people coming and going through the front doors. Every now and then we’d smile at each other like the old companions we had now become.
Annie Mae appreciated my simple presence and did not need much from me except to make sure I came by to spend time with her. At the end of each visit, she’d ask “When ya comin’ back?” and I would always say, “In a few days”—which meant I’d better show up in a few days or I would be letting her down. So, I did show up, two or three times a week, for seven years. The memory of those pleasant afternoons spent in Annie Mae’s presence still brings a sense of peace and quiet joy to my heart.
Annie Mae became family to Steve and me, so much so that we even call our daughter Annie. Annie Mae has been gone a long time now, but my friendship with her is truly ageless. With her, I feel I was able to let my true self—my inner child—show in a way that I am not always able to do. And I saw her true colors as well, “beautiful, like a rainbow.”
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Hanging Out—Steve’s Story
“Hi Mitch, how are you doing today? Been outside on the porch?”
“Nah, too hot out there. Say, what are you doing right now, Steve?”
“Not much. Just came by to hang out.”
“My TV’s not working. Can you figure out what’s wrong?”
“Probably just the batteries in the remote. Let’s take a look.”
For over two decades, I have been “hanging out” in nursing homes. Seems like a strange way to spend so much time. Yet I can’t come up with a better term to describe what I do. Occasionally we have a scheduled event like a game night or birthday party, but for the most part, I don’t go with a specific plan in mind. I don’t provide medical care. I’m not a preacher. I’m not a licensed counselor of any sort, though I am licensed to change batteries in remote controls.
Mostly, I just go hang out and see who needs me that day.
When I first went to the nursing home, I thought it was an impossible task, visiting all these people with whom I had nothing in common. Over time I learned you really can’t get it wrong. You don’t need to bring anything with you. You don’t need to have anything particularly inspiring to talk about. You just show up. You remember that there are no “uncomfortable silences” at the nursing home. Many of the residents have no one to talk to all day—so your mere presence makes a difference. If you find it difficult to sit in silence, you bring a game, or the newspaper and discuss the headlines. You simply show up and hang out.
Sure, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. We encounter loneliness throughout the nursing home. But as one volunteer told me, “I remind myself that the residents are just like everyone else and have to accept the situation that they are in and do what they can to get by. That’s something that all of us can relate to, no matter what age we are.” Yes, we’re able to relate to them, even though we don’t live in the facility. We’ve all faced difficult situations.
The amazing thing about it is, the more you hang out, the more common ground you find between you and those residents with whom you were sure you had nothing in common. Sometimes we’ve known a resident for months and then suddenly we find out we share a favorite movie, song, football team, or even a favorite color. Sometimes the common ground can be something your mothers said to you when you were growing up, like “You’ll spoil your appetite!” You might have nothing else in common, but something simple like that can be a catalyst for a new friendship.
I remember one day I was talking to a resident named Terry when he started a story, “One day when I was a boy, my father Dennis . . .” When I heard him say that, I exclaimed, “No way! My father’s name is Dennis also!” I felt an instant connection with Terry that day. I remember another day when I found a resident, James, wearing the exact same Florida Gator hockey-style sweatshirt. For whatever reason, little things like this can spark a friendship. I think that as humans, we’re always looking for common threads like this—we want to feel connections to others.
***
At the nursing home, you’ve got to use your hands, both in a physical sense (as in holding hands) and in the sense of not being afraid to step out of your comfort zone and “feel around” and experience the nursing home from an elder’s perspective. This is one of the reasons we chose “Through Your Hands,” by John Hiatt, as the unofficial theme song for Friends Across the Ages. The lyrics say:
Yeah, we scheme about the future
And we dream about the past
When just a simple reaching out
Might build a bridge that lasts
That pretty much sums up nursing home volunteering. It isn’t about the future, or the past. Some residents can’t remember the past—and the future? They might forget about your visit an hour after you leave. But we show up anyway. And that’s what it’s all about—just showing up and reaching out. We reach out and take whatever the nursing home throws at us for the day, whether it’s laughter or pain, sometimes with some awkwardness thrown in.
The “build a bridge” part is important too. We’ve used the bridge imagery on the Friends Across the Ages logo since the very beginning. We build bridges when we visit, most often between generations, but also between individuals of different races and ethnicities, religions, economic backgrounds, and more. I’ve learned more about milking cows and cooking collard greens than this city boy ever thought he would.
Maybe my journey, all these years of “hanging out,” will inspire you to try the same. While you will meet people totally unlike anyone else you know in your daily life, you’ll also meet many whose younger lives looked much like yours. Soon you realize it’s only the nursing home environment, the overwhelmingness of it all, that makes them seem different. They are people just like us, only devastated by poor health, old age, or loss of home and social life.
With over two million nursing home residents in the United States, there are some living in almost every town. Many don’t have a friend in the world, despite being loving, funny, appreciative, sincere, and sympathetic. Some are great listeners; others are great talkers. Some are pensive and quietly reflect on their life; others are restless and still plan to conquer the world. Regardless of where they fall on the spectrum, every visit with a nursing home resident is an adventure waiting to happen.
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Just Show Up—Allison’s Story
One crisp fall day, the first after a long, humid Florida summer. I hurried into the Friends Across the Ages office, coffee in one hand, keys rattling in the other, my computer bag slung over my shoulder. I was a few minutes early, but the new volunteer I was meeting was already waiting for me in the lobby—a good sign. I ushered her down the hall to the small, simple office, and waved her towards the chair across from me. She was a college student, not so different from me when I first started volunteering at nursing homes all those years ago. She looked at me with bright, eager eyes, but I detected a hint of anxiety in her glance as well.
After a few introductory comments, we were ready to get down to business. With what I hoped was a welcoming, inviting smile I said, “Well, to start off with, what questions do you have for me?”
She thought for a moment, her eyes fixed on the patch of forget-me-not blue sky visible through the window behind me. Then she looked back and asked: “What will I do at the nursing home? I mean, I know we’re just there to visit with the people, but what do I say to them? What should I do with them?”
I smiled again and reassured her that almost everyone asks that question. And I told her, “The answer depends on the individual resident and the individual volunteer, and what kinds of things they like to do. Some residents like playing games. Some like reading together. Some enjoy watching a particular TV show with a friend.”
I leaned forward, trying to make this next point clear: “You want to know the secret? In some ways it doesn’t matter what you do. Just go. Just show up. You will have already succeeded just by walking through that door.”
Then I added some advice I give every new volunteer: “Try not to worry too much about it if the first few visits feel a little awkward. It really does get easier, I promise! Just show up and keep showing up. What we do and say isn’t so important; just being there is what matters.”
I watched her nod as she took that point in. But I wondered if she really understood; I know it took me a long time to learn this lesson.
***
I can empathize with the concerns and questions of new volunteers. For many of us, visiting a nursing home is a huge step outside our comfort zone. It can take a lot of emotional energy to try something new, to make room in one’s schedule, to deal with the awkwardness of figuring out logistics like how to get there, where to park, which entrance to use, etc. Then there are the different sights, smells, and sounds to be encountered: the guy yelling “Help!” down the hall, the woman half asleep in her chair, the smell of disinfectant, and the unpleasant odors they try to mask. Just working up the courage and determination to overcome all of that and walk through the door is not always easy.
Sometimes one’s personality can be a factor as well. As an introvert I have had a strong streak of shyness since childhood. My parents and teachers used to get somewhat frustrated with me when I was young because it was so hard to get me out of my shell. Turtle-like, I’d peer out at the world, watching my classmates, reluctant to join in. I have a hazy memory from kindergarten of standing on a sandy playground under the hot Florida sun, watching the other children play a game in the cool shade of a nearby tree. I longed to join in but was too frightened to make the first move.
Although I have been volunteering at nursing homes for a long time now, I admit that sometimes I still have similar concerns when entering a facility I don’t usually visit; I still feel like that shy kid on the playground. Who will want to talk with me? What will I do with them? What will people think of me? Will someone say I shouldn’t be there? Even after all these years, it can take some effort to just walk through the door.
But I am always glad I did, and each time it has gotten a little easier. After almost a quarter century of walking through the doors, the facility that Steve and I visit most often truly feels like another home. In fact, just recently one of our kids said exactly that when we were there one day: “This place feels like a second home.” The people there have become family to us, including some of the staff. Allen, the activity director, calls our kids his “niece and nephew,” and Steve and I do indeed think of him as a brother. I think it gets easier for the residents, too, as we continue to show up. They get used to us. They learn they can count on us. They start to trust us.
Just seeing our faces week after week can make a huge difference. They may not know our names (or may not remember) but they know they have seen us before. It was once quite common for the residents to refer to Steve and me as “that boy” and “that girl.”
“Who?”
“You know, ‘that boy, that girl’ . . . the ones who are always here.”
The ones who are always here. I can’t think of a better way to be known.
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Our culture has a low tolerance for silence. Being present without words or activities is one of the most challenging things one can do. But if we are willing to try, it can make a meaningful difference for those we visit as well as for us. In the following story, Jon Shinn shows what can happen when one is willing to simply be present.
The Silent Treatment—Jon’s Story
My first meeting with Jack did not go at all as planned. As an eager new volunteer with no prior nursing home experience, I came in with an expectation of delightful cross-generational chitchat that had to be quickly abandoned. Instead, I found myself looking into a pair of sad, slightly bewildered eyes, making increasingly desperate attempts to start a conversation and being met only with silence and the occasional grunt. I finally decided that the respectful thing to do would be to stop trying, but I did not want to give up on him completely. I asked if he would mind if I sat silently for a while. He shrugged, so I sat.
I had recently acquired an interest in meditation, so I took the opportunity to quietly watch my breathing and the movement of my mind as it struggled with how to connect with the seemingly broken man who lay before me. I stayed for the full hour as originally planned, and at the end I thanked him for allowing me to stay and told him that I would be back again next week.
The next few visits were largely the same, but I could see that he was slowly showing the faintest signs of trust and curiosity, and by the third or fourth visit I managed to get a few short sentences of response intermingled with those long periods of silence. Thus began an unconventional four-year friendship that would continue to challenge my assumptions and open my heart.
Though mostly free of notable tragedies, the overall arc of life had been hard on Jack. He spoke of the high point as his time serving in Korea as a navy pilot and instructor, and of the difficult years that followed—a failed marriage and then many years of career struggles, solitude, and quiet alcoholism. He had given up drinking and smoking only when his health had failed a few years prior, landing him in the bed in which I had found him with no friends or family and not much to do but sit and wait for his final moments to arrive. He seemed to have not much that he wanted to live for, but the fear of death was enough to keep him hanging on.
For the first few years of our friendship, nearly every discussion with Jack included talk of the depression that he struggled with daily. I tried various things to encourage and connect with him, from bringing in his favorite movies to watch, to building him a model of the airplane he used to fly, to hanging a painting of a Caribbean island on the ceiling above his bed (because he said tropical beaches were his favorite places). I tried to take him out for walks, but he was generally uninterested. So mostly we stayed in his room. I just tried to be present with him, letting him know that someone cared and helping him connect with something outside of his daily misery.
Then, one day, Jack responded to my initial greeting with something that caught me off guard. “Doing well,” he said, “finally got rid of that depression.” As I sat stunned thinking of what to say, he followed up with: “I started smoking again. Want to take me outside for a smoke?”
Thus began a different phase of our relationship, in which every visit involved me getting him into his wheelchair and heading outside, where we sat in the courtyard and chatted while he smoked and sipped on a Coke from the vending machine. I had always hated smoking, but it was hard to argue with the positive effect that it had on Jack, or with his decision to jeopardize his health for something that gave a little more vitality to his final years. He even got to know a few of the other smokers, including a feisty old gal who would tease him and recount to me things they had conversed about in the times between my visits.
Jack never spoke of his depression again, but within a few weeks, it was replaced with an anxiety that persisted until his death. I figured that in addition to a decline in health, the nicotine from the cigarettes coupled with the sugar and caffeine from the sodas were probably contributing factors, but I withheld those judgments and continued to just stay present for him. I had come to deeply respect his sovereignty and right to do whatever he needed to endure the final years of a difficult life.
When his health failed a year or so later, Jack went on hospice care and our trips outside stopped. He was on oxygen at that time, and so we couldn’t talk much, causing our relationship to a close in the same way that it began—with long periods of silence and presence. He died quietly in the night a few weeks later.
That was many years ago, and as I reflect on my time with Jack, I feel a curious mix of sadness and gratitude. I don’t pretend to have had any great transformative effect on his life, but I believe that our friendship did provide some little bit of joy, or at least relief, in his final years. There also was something redemptive about the fact that he had a friend in the end and thus did not pass away in total anonymity.
Overall, though, I think it was I who gained the most from the friendship. Jack taught me how to sit in silence with another’s suffering, which I now understand to be one of the most important aspects of human compassion. And as I look at my life today and all that I have to be grateful for, including a loving marriage and four beautiful children born in the years since he passed, I am reminded of how the opportunity to serve as witness to the end of Jack’s life softened me. It helped me learn to cherish my relationships and to stay present with the daily joys, opportunities, and heartbreaks that each life inevitably holds.
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Anyone who has experienced the “long goodbye” with family or friends suffering from dementia knows how difficult it can be when the day comes when they no longer recognize you. This can be true for nursing home volunteers as well. In the following story, Laura Londono shares how she overcame the pain and found another way to be present with her friend, Patricia.
Holding Hands—Laura’s Story
Patricia was a light in the nursing home; an incredibly sweet woman with whom I had the honor of becoming very close. She loved her family and would talk about her kids and grandkids at length, showing me the pictures and cards that they had sent her. I felt as if I knew them personally. I would also show her pictures of my family and keep her up to date on any happenings and events. My parents would send their regards every time I visited her. We became a part of each other’s families.
Towards the end, Patricia was having lapses in memory. Even though I had been visiting with her for over two years, there were times when I would walk into her room with my normal bright smile, only to be greeted by a blank face. She didn’t recognize who I was.
Facing this new reality was incredibly painful. We had built a beautiful relationship and it was hard to accept that, at times, Patricia had no memory of me or the time we had spent together. The first time this happened, I tried to jog her memory and tell her who I was. I’d say that I had known her for a while and recount some of the stories she had told me.
But once I realized that she genuinely had no recollection, I asked if I could hold her hand and opted to just sit with her. This small act was enough to provide both of us with some comfort. Even though we were no longer sharing stories or news about our families, we were still spending time together and at the end of the day, that’s all that mattered.
Friendship Building Blocks—Chapter One
· Just show up: You have already succeeded just by walking through the door, even if the visit does not seem to be a “success” on the surface.
· When you visit someone who is lonely, the perfect words are not really needed; just a quiet, compassionate presence.
· When you regularly spend time with someone different from you, you may find more common ground than you might have expected on the surface.
Reflection Questions—Chapter One
1) Is there someone in your life who could benefit from your simple presence? How might you share the gifts of your time and attention more generously and intentionally?
2) Can you think of a time when someone showed up for you? What did that mean to you?
3) Have you ever discovered unexpected common ground by simply “hanging out” with someone different?
4) Have you ever sat in silence with someone who is suffering—or had someone sit with you when you are suffering? What was that like for you?
5) What are some ways to be creatively, lovingly present with someone who can no longer communicate with us in the usual ways?
There was a period of time when I first moved out of the house that I was completely absorbed by my own emotional turmoil. My selfish attitude consumed all of my energy. Then one day I received a call. An older gentleman in my church had just lost his license and could no longer drive. Would I please consider becoming his driver two to three times each week?
My life changed (though originally I had zero desire to change or be involved in someone else's life). What happens when we allow our focus to be drawn away from ourselves?
This wonderful book reminded me of those two incredible years sharing life and a car with one who had 60 years more life experience than I did. Bridging Generations brilliantly examples the beauty of sharing our lives with those who are often left alone. Yet, it also brings to light the fact that the lives of others can greatly impact us as well if we will give them the opportunity.
While not written with any particular religious background (a few mentions of prayer and a couple references to God are scattered throughout but feel insignificant), the call to selfless love of others is admirable. The many stories shared in Bridging Generations encourage us to look outside ourselves in a very specific way by visiting the elderly and invalid. How can you not consider trying something new at your local retirement center or assisted living when you've just read 52 incredible reminders of how previous life is, no matter your age?
The writing, while simple, is captivating. Bridging Generations does not aim for eloquence; however, a book does not have to be academic or superfluous in words to be considered well-written. A homey, familial style draws the reader in and matches the theme and intent of the book perfectly. I enjoyed Bridging Generations immensely; in fact, each time I picked it up, I couldn't put it down!
Is this book for everyone? Perhaps not; however, I do believe everyone would benefit from reading it. It's 5 enthusiastic stars from me!