Ecumen Trustee Anne Simpson’s Journey Through the Wilderness of Alzheimer’s
Anne Simpson, who joined the Ecumen Board of Trustees in 2013, was caregiver to her husband, Bob, as they fought his battle with Alzheimer’s and Lewy Body Dementia that ended in 2011. Her book, Through the Wilderness of Alzheimer’s chronicles their experience with a focus on helping others who must take the same journey.
It is a poignant, painful, often funny, unvarnished memoir-in-real-time. Throughout the book, sadness is not overplayed, bitterness and anger not mitigated, joy in each other not abandoned, and hope for their future – together and beyond Bob’s eventual death – never beyond reach. Both Bob and Anne were clearly committed to an honest account of this challenging time. “It was just important for us to do that,” says Anne.
Anne and Bob forged their life together over the past four decades — he a United Church of Christ (UCC) minister, she the mother and homemaker for their blended family. At the time they married, four of their six children were teenagers, the youngest was eight.
From Grand Marais to Wayzata, St. Paul to Amery, Wisc., Bob led churches and the greater UCC organization. On a farm in Amery they raised sheep while Bob served interim terms at UCC churches. They retired to their favorite artsy, eclectic and caring community of Grand Marais, in 1993. Within two years, Bob would begin his journey with Alzheimer’s, accompanied by his faithful partner, caregiver and friend.
“It’s taken some time to re-define myself – who am I now that I’m not a caregiver?” Anne says. “I am energized now to engage others in conversations about the aging process.” She is particularly interested in working with people who are working to improve the aging experience, enabling people with choices and leading eventually to a gentle ending.
With longstanding Ecumen Trustee, the Rev. Kris Linner, Anne has written a companion curriculum to her book that teaches in practical terms the lessons she and Bob learned firsthand. Through the curriculum and workshops, congregations can support their members who are experiencing Alzheimer’s — as caregivers or as those with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. The curriculum is available from Huff Publishing Associates.
Today Anne makes her home in a Grand Avenue condo in St. Paul. You might find her out walking the neighborhood or at a nearby restaurant enjoying lunch or dinner with friends. We are grateful that she is dedicating a portion of her free time and gracious energy to Ecumen.
Anne’s poem “Autumn Sabbath,” below, captures the spirit of her journey with Bob:
Put on your old wool hat, my love.
Come –
let’s walk uphill
where noon sun warms our shoulders and
summer ripeness lingers on the breeze…
…Drink deep with me the burgundy of oak,
sniff musk bouquet of birch Chablis,
then let us dip and swirl ‘til we are dizzy,
do-si-do with muffled steps on careless leaves.
Forget neat piles that we have yet to rake,
the wood to stack, windows to be washed.
Let’s be grasshoppers today
and ants, perhaps, tomorrow.
We’ll let the dogs run free on rocky ground;
we’ll hear the birds call, watch them feed
and toast to their long journey
though they’ll pack the sun away.
Put on your hiking boots, a jacket;
I’ll bring bread.
Let me take your work-rough hand in mine.
Stay out with me
until the sun goes down.
Oliver, the Golden Retriever, Feels the Love At Ecumen Scenic Shores
Oliver, the golden retriever, has an extended family of 40. He’s being raised by the residents of Ecumen Scenic Shores Assisted Living in Two Harbors, Minn.
Housing Manager Julie Luchsinger sums it up this way: “A big thing at Ecumen is creating home, and home to a lot of people is having a dog lying around,” she said. The Lake County News Chronicle tells Oliver’s story.
[Oliver is shown in the photo with resident Bobby Smith, who used to train dogs.]
Readers’ Choice: The Most Popular Changing Aging Blog Posts of 2013 (Part 2)
Yesterday we listed the top 5 Changing Aging blog posts for 2013. Today top posts ranked 6 through 10 are listed below with links:
7. Irene Carlson's Dream Come True
8. The 20 Basics From Ritz-Carlton - Have You Experienced Them?
9. Ecumen and MOJO Minnesota Launch AgePower Tech Search
10. A Volley Across the Generations Between Gustavus Adolphus College and Ecumen in Saint Peter
Readers’ Choice: The Most Popular Changing Aging Blog Posts of 2013 (Part 1)
As 2013 comes to a close, we’re sharing your favorite blogs from the past 12 months. The most popular stories are an eclectic mix of news and features about people and programs — inspired by Ecumen’s vision of “a world in which aging is viewed and understood in radically different ways.”
We are calling out the top 10— with the top 5 listed today and next 5 coming tomorrow.
1. Ecumen Receives $3 Million Margaret A. Cargill Foundation Grant
2. A Goodbye Without Tears – Almost by Ecumen Blogger Jim Klobuchar
3. Top 10 Holiday Gifts for Seniors: Ecumen Staff Offers Advice
4. A Visit with the Man with 125 Kids
5. Secrets to 75 Years of Marriage and a Final Goodbye on Valentine's Day
Ecumen of Litchfield Residents and Staff Sing the Praises of Lutefisk
In the great lutefisk debate, a group of residents and staff at Ecumen of Litchfield vote strongly in favor of the controversial cod.
They make field trips to the Litchfield VFW to partake and literally sing the praises of lutefisk. In his "Land of 10,000 Stories," KARE11's Boyd Huppert tells this stinky fish story.
At the beginning of the video, you can see the Ecumen of Litchfield residents walking into the VFW, and toward the end, staffers Julie K. and Jeanie D. lead the diners in the "Lutefisk Song."
Fran Tarkenton at 73 Remembers Pro Football Before the Mayhem-- by Ecumen Blogger Jim Klobuchar
The current phenomenon known as pro football was introduced to Minnesota and its tributaries more than 50 years ago. The audience for the first game in 1961, played not far from the cornfields of south Bloomington, was a modest 32,236, and the indisputable star was a rookie quarterback and now lively septuagenarian named Francis Tarkenton.
I can tell you all of this because I wrote about football then for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and also wrote a book about Francis well before his elevation to the National Football League Hall of Fame. We retain a friendship that cheerfully spans the decades.
He was on the phone a few days ago, the same old effervescent Francis. “Klobey,” he said, “I’m 73 and never felt better, my business [advising startup corporations] is thriving but the old pro football I knew and played looks to be gone forever.”
He meant what pro football, in its unprecedented wealth and prosperity, is inflicting on itself—aided, he is convinced, by a runaway use of performance enhancing drugs.
Add the life-threatening injuries that are multiplying each year because of the increased size of the players, the speed of the game and its furies. Add the non-stop mayhem of it and the big money incentives that with each new season bring the game a little closer to the martial arts ferocities that turn competition into mayhem.
Add the growing evidence that football at all levels can be potentially life-threatening. If not life-threatening then damaging via concussions in a way that that might last a lifetime. It’s a reason why many parents of today are looking for other less dangerous sports.
“People are getting hurt in ways they didn’t before,” he said. “The incentives to make it in pro football are huge. I loved the game — still do. But its very success is making it a more dangerous game than when we played it 30 and 40 years ago. And now it spills into the college game. Bigger players. If it takes drugs to make them bigger, that too.”
How big? Grotesque big in some cases. Defensive linemen weighing 340 pounds, seemingly impossible to move out of the way.
But they CAN be moved because the large people facing them on the other side of the line of scrimmage are about as big.
Are they all taking drugs? Of course not. Are the drugs available if they want? They are.
So the pro football league walks a tightrope. Its popularity has turned the enjoyment of sports into a caricature in ways large and small. Once there were pro football games on Sunday afternoons. The TV ratings, meek in the years of black and white television, began to expand with color TV. Then there were pro football games on Monday night. That became so popular that they added pro football games on Sunday night. That became so popular that the league itself produced a football game on Thursday night on its own network. But for all of its TV popularity, for all of the billions of dollars in profits that it produces, pro football is walking a razor’s edge in some places by charging its season ticket buyers a license fee to retain permanent ownership of the seats that they pay thousands of dollars a year to buy.
Some people call that an inducement. Another word is flat-out coercion. Yet the game’s popularity has become almost mythic. Otherwise normal human beings invest money in fantasy football leagues. Their fantasy team’s performance is based on what happens in the actual games being played out on television. That now means they have a stake in what happens Sunday afternoon, Monday night, Sunday night and Thursday night. Millions of otherwise normal men (and now normal women) have begun using the same language in routine conversation that the football scouts and the analysts use during the games: pistol formation, back shoulder pass, read option, nickel (defense), bubble screen and more (offense).
So pro football and televised football in general have become a national mania, easily surpassing the popularity of all other sports. It’s evidenced in the current hysteria over college football in the American South, in the jockeying for post-season riches and acclaim. But the increased exposure to injury and stories of former players now battling the results of concussions has led to legal action and serious questions raised increasingly by worried parents.
“There’s no question,” Francis Tarkenton said, “that pro football, any football, has to be concerned about the fallout from those big bodies hitting each other in today’s game.”
Billions of dollars are at stake here. There’s some evidence that the public is going to start demanding some rationality about how far football should go at the amateur level.
All of that is exciting, Tarkenton conceded. “But certainly in pro football we’re being carried to excess here. Would you believe that football once was actually fun?”
Ecumen Meadows’ Arlene Schlichte Turns Her Hobby Into a Charity for Children
Arlene Schlichte, 87, has created a charitable cottage industry headquartered in her apartment at Ecumen Meadows in Worthington, Minn. For the past six years, she has been crocheting scarves by the hundreds and donating them to Worthington children who need help fighting off the winter cold.
Worthington is a place where many children come from warmer climates, unprepared for the Minnesota winter. Arlene’s daughter-in-law, a Worthington first grade teacher, brought this to Arlene’s attention and asked if she would crochet some scarves for the class.
So the first year, Arlene crocheted 25 scarves. Then the teacher in the adjoining room saw the children wearing Arlene’s scarves and wondered if her class could have some too. Then word started to spread to other classrooms and other schools, and before Arlene knew it, she was crocheting more than 100 scarves. And enjoying every minute of it.
Arlene loves to crochet, so being able to help children with her skill took the joy of her hobby to a new level.
Crochet has been such a part of Arlene’s life that she can’t pinpoint exactly when she started doing it. Over the years, she has made afghans for her six children and 18 grandchildren and takes great pride in that work. Arlene and her husband, who is now in a care center, raised their family in Wilmont, Minn., where they owned a service station. Arlene kept the books and also worked part-time at the Wilmont Post Office.
She has another hobby that she combines with crocheting — watching sports on television. She loves to follow Minnesota sports teams, so she pulls up a chair in front of the TV set and watches a game while she crochets a scarf. Each scarf takes about two hours, and she does one a day.
“It’s a relaxing thing for me,” she says.
So far, she has only heard about the results of her work by word of mouth. “I don’t get out much, but someday I would like to walk into a store or somewhere and see one of the children wearing one of my scarves.”
How would she know if it’s a scarf she has made? “I will know,” she says with a confident smile.
Honoring Judith Johnson, Who Just Celebrated Her 104th Birthday at Ecumen Parmly LifePointes
Judith Swenson Johnson was born in North Branch, Minn. before the start of World War I. She recently celebrated her 104th birthday at Ecumen Parmly LifePointes in Chisago City. In a Chisago County Press article, the positive, forward-looking Judith tells reporter Denise Martin: “I just wonder what’s going to happen next.”
Alzheimer's & Dementia Care: "Listening to Elderly Cuts Use of Costly Medications," Ecumen Awakenings Featured in Minneapolis Star Tribune
So many people across Ecumen have made Ecumen Awakenings possible and are contributing to the program's learnings and growth. It is innovation that empowers and honors those with Alzheimer's and other types of dementia while underscoring our mission and vision. Saturday's front-page article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune features a long story on this great work. Thank you to everyone who makes Awakenings possible and to our colleagues and customers at Ecumen Parmly LifePointes who opened their lives and shared their experiences with the newspaper.
You can read the article by clicking here: Listening to elderly cuts use of costly medications
Or cut and paste the following url into your browser: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/236822161.html.
About Ecumen Awakenings:
Ecumen Awakenings™ is working to transform America’s culture of care for people living with Alzheimer’s and related dementias. Awakenings improves lives and care experiences while achieving the optimum benefits and balance of non-pharmacological and biomedical approaches. Offered by leading non-profit Ecumen, Awakenings is an empowering, collaborative approach to care that honors one’s individuality and abilities while enriching lives.
This collaboration of the person, care professionals, physicians, pharmacists and loved ones often leads to reduction or elimination of antipsychotic medication use and prevents many people from moving to antipsychotics, which carry significant health risks for older adults. “Awakenings” occur as behavioral symptoms decrease and one’s abilities and personality emerge.
Ecumen VP of Philanthropy Judy Blaseg Featured in Star Tribune “Movers & Shakers”
In the Star Tribune’s Movers & Shakers column today, Ecumen VP of Philanthropy Judy Blaseg talks about how Ecumen’s mission and her personal experience drew her to applying her fundraising skills to issues related to aging.