Copyright Photo by Laura Crosby

Changing Aging has featured several poems from St. Paul writer Anne Simpson, who wrote Growing Down, a book of poems and photography on she and her husband’s journey with Alzheimer’s. Please read earlier posts here in order: Growing Down: Poems for an Alzheimer’s Patient, Diagnosis, I’m Still Here, Bob Said He Was Growing Down.What is so beautiful about Anne’s work is that it doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges of Alzheimer’s, but it also underscores hope, as with this excerpt from the third chapter called ‘End Stage.’

‘ … . He would rejoice to know that ‘blessings’ of this disease still are unfolding: we are close to our families and we have reconnected with friends who have not seen him in years.Bob (a Methodist minister) is in ministry still, teaching us patience and acceptance. He is dying a gracious death. There were several years of high anxiety and constant chatter, but he is more peaceful now. He talks very little, but he says ‘Good, good.’ He says, ‘Thank you’ and ‘I love … ‘Even as he approaches the end of his long struggle with dementia, he can give love and he can receive it. He is still here!

Thank you, Anne, for sharing yourself and your poetry with ‘Changing Aging.’ Below is one more work of Anne’s called Visitation:In the Alzheimer’s homewhere the young mother has come to visit,her baby is crying.You hold out your arms.You sit on a cold, metal fold-up chairby the nurse’s desk,sit calmly as you hold the flailing bundle —purple screwed-up face,fists and feet pummelling the air,tiny lungs forming screamsthat pierce old deafened ears.Bent over the child, you sit,gently rocking,stroking her,speaking sounds no others understand.You murmur the language that comes before speechthat she, so recently arrived,and you, so close to return,can speak together.