An Unlikely Caregiver Battles Dementia with Friendship at Ecumen Prairie Hill in St. Peter
Doug Mehlhaff’s job description is about caretaking rather than caregiving. But lately it’s hard to make the distinction.
As Environmental Services Manager at Ecumen Prairie Hill and Sand Prairie in St. Peter, Minn., Doug is responsible for the bricks and mortar and the surrounding grounds — making sure the residents have a safe, clean and well-maintained place to live.
But when you see Doug working at that job, very often you see Bill Sexe too. Bill is 63 years old and is a resident at Ecumen Prairie Hill. He has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and Lewy body disease, a progressive brain disorder that cause motor impairment and is the second leading cause of dementia in the elderly. The routines of daily life are full of challenges for him.
Bill and Doug have formed a deep and abiding bond — a bigger-than-dementia friendship that touches the heart of everyone who sees them together.
“This is such a special relationship,” says Nicki Rehnelt, the housing director. “Seeing Doug and Bill moving through the day together is just so uplifting.”
It’s not that they do anything out of the ordinary. Rather, it’s that the very ordinary things they do together take on a special meaning because of Bill’s disease and Doug’s determination to help him have a normal life.
They pull weeds. They water flowers. They clean carpets. Or they just go for a walk.
Doug says when Bill came to live at Ecumen Prairie Hill last April it was just so obvious that Bill want to be doing more — that he was not going to succumb to this disease.
As if it were meant to be, the friendship just happened. “I just sort of started helping Bill help himself,” Doug said. “I knew that he could be doing more.”
Their routine is now well-established. Most days, they’ll have breakfast together and get to work, side by side. “If I don’t see Bill, I really miss him,” Doug says.
“Bill just wants to be one of the guys, and there’s only about 10 years difference in our ages,” says Doug. “We’re able to communicate and just be good friends. Sometimes he’ll have a really bad day, and we’ll talk it through and find the faith side of a bad situation.”
And they find wisdom. Doug says the main thing he has learned though his friendship with Bill is simply this: “No matter what, live every day to the fullest.”
Top 5 Blog Posts - October 6
Baby Elsie, our youngest volunteer, topped Ecumen's list of most popular blog posts last week. In case you missed out, here are the stories our online visitors found most interesting.
Elsie Williams, 9 Months Old, is Changing Aging as Ecumen's Youngest Volunteer
"Smile" on Ecumen When You Shop on Amazon
Dr. John Brose on Dementia Care: It Doesn't Have to Be This Way
Adeline Carlson, a Gold Star Mother Living at Ecumen Detroit Lakes, Remembers That Day - Always
Star Tribune Highlights Ecumen's Efforts to Make Communities More Age Friendly
To read more Changing Aging stories or Ecumen news, please visit ecumen.org.
Ecumen Scholars Program To Train Nurses Featured in Mankato Free Press
In today’s Mankato Free Press, Jessica Bies reports on Ecumen’s initiative to address the critical shortage of nurses being trained to care for Minnesota’s rapidly aging population.
Working with Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU), Ecumen is creating the Ecumen Scholars program to provide educational, vocational and financial opportunities for nursing students to pursue careers in senior health care.
The program is supported by a $1.9 million grant from the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation.
SCAN Foundation Summit Makes One Wonder: Shouldn't The United States Have A Strategy For Paying for Alzheimer's Care?
If we can build railroads, airplanes and highways, our country should be able to build new, viable solutions for long-term services and supports that help millions of Americans with Alzheimer's and other long-term care needs.
Star Tribune Highlights Ecumen’s Efforts To Make Communities More Age Friendly
Ecumen, the City of Apple Valley, Minn., and national and international business partners, have been working for the past two years on the issue of how to make communities more age friendly.
This week the “Vitalocity!” initiative convened a three-day workshop in Apple Valley to get specific about how to make age-friendliness a reality. Ecumen’s partners in Vitalocity! are Kendal Corporation,a Pennsylvania-based senior services nonprofit company, and BusinessLab, a UK-based global strategy consultancy.
See Star Tribune Reporter Liz Sawyer’s story about the workshop, including an interview about the initiative with Ecumen CEO Kathryn Roberts, and Sawyer's follow-up story on specific steps Apple Valley could take to be more age friendly.
Ecumen of Litchfield Resident Don Nordlie’s Eyewitness Account of the Battle of Iwo Jima Memorialized
Don and Wanda Nordlie, residents of Ecumen of Litchfield, were at the battle of Iwo Jima almost 70 years ago. He was a Marine sergeant, and she was a nurse.
Two other Litchfield men, Roger Tipka, U. S. Army, and Stan Mortenson, U.S. Navy, also were there.
Don, Roger and Stan raised the flag during the National Anthem at a Minnesota Twins game a couple of weeks ago, no doubt remembering the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising that happened six days into what would be a bloody 36-day battle leaving almost 30,000 dead.
Litchfield resident Tim Mergen has brought their story to life, turning their battlefield recollections into a presentation honoring their service. Mergen points out that Iwo Jima is “pretty close to the size of Litchfield” and asks his audiences to “imagine going around Litchfield and laying 30,000 bodies across that town.”
How Mergen pieced the story together and continues to bring it home for local residents is the cover story in the September issue of Zest Magazine, a publication of the Litchfield Independent Review.
Elsie Williams, 9 Months Old, Is Changing Aging as Ecumen’s Youngest Volunteer
Meet Elsie Williams, the youngest, sweetest and cutest volunteer at Ecumen Seasons at Maplewood.
Last week Elsie mugged for the Star Tribune as she played Bingo with namesake resident Elsie Gustafson, 94. Star Tribune Columnist Gayle Rosenblum wrote the heartwarming story of Elsie and Elsie — a tale of how a charming 9-month-old connects across the generations
“It brings me so much joy to have her bring joy to older people,” says Amy Williams, Elsie’s proud mother, who is Ecumen’s Director of Development. “But it’s equally a gift to her. My Elsie will have so many friends of different ages.”
Top Five Blog Posts - September 29
In case you missed out on some of last week's Changing Aging blog posts, here are the stories Ecumen's online visitors found most interesting:
Adeline Carlson, a Gold Star Mother Living at Ecumen Detroit Lakes, Remembers That Day - Always
Ecumen CEO Kathryn Roberts Among Women Leaders Honored by George Family Foundation
Ecumen's Paul Libbon Named to Aging Services of Minnesota Board
Honoring the Rich Tradition of Volunteerism at Ecumen Parmly LifePointes
Ecumen Century Club: Honoring the Always Positive Pearl Nelson, 103
To read more Changing Aging stories or to learn more about Ecumen, please visit ecumen.org.
“Smile” on Ecumen When You Shop on Amazon
Amazon.com now offers a simple way to support your favorite charitable organization every time you shop — at no cost to you.
When you shop at smile.amazon.com, Amazon automatically donates 0.5% of the price of your eligible AmazonSmile purchases to the charitable organization of your choice.
Most all Amazon products are eligible for donations, and all IRS-register charitable organizations qualify for contributions.
We hope you will “smile” on your favorite charitable organization. And we hope that’s Ecumen.
See AmazonSmile’s FAQ for more details and this USA Today story about the new program.
Ecumen Joining City of Apple Valley In Design Workshop Focused on Making Aging Advantageous to Cities
How does a city actually become “age friendly” to create competitive advantage amidst unprecedented demographic change?
Answers will come in a unique three-day work workshop September 30th to October 2nd in Apple Valley, Minnesota, which like most American communities is grappling with these very questions as their populations grow older in record numbers. Local, national and global experts from diverse sectors will create a roadmap for Apple Valley and cities globally that desire to turn “Age Friendly Community” from a phrase into a reality.
The workshop will be convened by Vitalocity! – a new consultancy founded by a group involving Ecumen , Kendal Corporation a Pennsylvania-based senior services nonprofit company, and BusinessLab, a UK-based global strategy consultancy. From September 30 through October 2, these founding partners will be joined by Apple Valley residents and community leaders along with representatives from global organizations such as the International Federation on Ageing, a World Health Organization (WHO) partner; Perkins Eastman, an international architectural and design firm; Sodexo, which provides nutritional and other quality of life services to more than 75 million consumers worldwide and global technology company, IBM.
The Problem: Our Cities Aren’t Designed for Aging
In today’s cities, if you’re not spry and mobile, you’re largely out of luck. This isolates people, limits their contributions to a city’s social and economic vitality, and can have significant health impacts.
Exploring this phenomenon in depth, WHO created the WHO Age Friendly City Framework, which provides eight characteristics (below) necessary for an age friendly city. The Framework is a critically important step in creating cities for all ages and stages, and more than 250 cities have subscribed to its tenets. But no entity exists globally that cities can turn to for cohesive planning and technical advice to turn the Framework into results.
Vitalocity! seeks to change that by bringing diverse skills and expertise together to help cities deliver phased, measurable, quantifiable results based on the eight components (below) of the WHO’s Age Friendly City Framework:
- Respect and social inclusion
- Outdoor spaces and buildings
- Transportation
- Communications and information
- Social participation
- Housing
- Community support and health
- Civic participation and employment
Our Cities’ Changing Population Driving Age-Friendly Strategy
For the first time in history, more than half of the human population - 3.3 billion people - live in cities. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. And this population is getting older. For example, in the last 10 years, in every one of America’s 51 largest major metropolitan areas, the number of children relative to the number of elderly has declined. In Pittsburgh, which is America’s oldest city demographically, almost 25% of the metro area’s population is over 60.
Locations long considered magnets for the young and hip are also aging rapidly. In Manhattan and San Francisco, almost 20% of the population is over 60, well above the national average.
According to a new report by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and AARP, in 1990, less than 5 percent of U.S. counties had a population where adults over 50 made up more than 40 percent of the community (that was 156 counties). By 2010, this was true of 33 percent of all U.S. counties (or 1,031 of them). The U.S. population over age 65 is expected to include 73 million people by 2030 (that's about 33 million more than today).
And most of these people live in metropolitan areas, particularly suburbs, making Apple Valley an ideal location to launch this important work and turn age friendly design in our world from concept to reality.