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Recently, Michael Verde was a featured guest on Massage Therapy Radio. Read more »
One of the first things students in the Memory Bridge program are asked to do is to draw “life maps” ― visual depictions of the experiences, memories, thoughts, feelings and dreams that make up their life story. Creating these drawings of their own unique worlds helps the students understand that each Memory Bridge buddy also inhabits a rich, deep and highly personal world; it gives the students a chance as well to reveal intimate, sometimes traumatic, experiences that might otherwise be hard to talk about. Read more »
Here is a funny sad story, or a sad funny story, I can't decide. Either way, it's true, and it may cause you to think twice about who among us are truly absent. Read more »
Umme is a student at Senn High School on Chicago’s far north side, known as one of the most international schools in the country. Children from 60 countries, speaking more than 45 languages, attend the school. Umme herself is from Pakistan; she speaks Urdu as well as English. She was recruited to the Memory Bridge project to be buddies with an Indian woman called Patel, who speaks no English at all, so that they could communicate in their native language. Read more »
A certain young politician a few years back wrote a book entitled "The Audacity of Hope". I must admit that I have not read it, but the title was enough. (I did vote for the author, Mr. Obama, however.) And many years ago, when I was getting my training in theology, I learned about “hope against hope” and “hope in things not seen,” catchphrases that spoke about the possibility of hope even in the face of the greatest catastrophe or the worst despair. Read more »
This attractive desk clock has all the same features as the wall clock with the day and date: clear, readable dates and number and an analog clock that is familiar. It’s an excellent, reliable and subtle reminder of the day and date for anyone – whether you have dementia or not! The day and date automatically change at midnight. Read more »
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" has a fascinating premise: a child is born in an old body and grows physically younger throughout his life, while his mind develops and ages in the usual trajectory. Yet this is a movie that is less about what it means to be a young mind stuck inside an old body (or an old mind housed by an infant’s) and much more about the universal need for care. Perhaps this film has had such an impact because we live in a society in which being cared for--especially if one is born in an imperfect body or has aged into an imperfect mind--can no longer be assumed. Benjamin’s father, a button manufacturer named Mr. Button, illustrates this idea when he abandons his son shortly after birth on the steps of an old folks’ home. Ultimately, however, this is a film about the love required to truly care for another human being. Every other encounter in the film exemplifies this worthy ideal. Read more »
Some years ago now, Memory Bridge board member Carla Borden sought Michael Verde’s help in finding an assisted living facility for her mother Yetta, who, because of her advancing Alzheimer’s, was no longer able to live alone. Read more »
Welcome to Memory Bridge's autumn edition of Crossings. Along with the change of season have come many wonderful new expressions of Memory Bridge's mission. You can read about our new projects in upcoming editions of Crossings. Read more »
The people who change our life are never famous. Presidents, kings, billionaires, movie stars, legends of sport and entertainment, the great minds in art, science, and technology--these are the people who change the news, occasionally the world, but never our lives. While we pay attention to these people, the people who change our life are paying attention to us. Read more »
This summer, I went to ICAD (the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease). Almost all the presentations at the conference were about molecular biology. They dealt with proteins and genes, and the inner workings of brain cells. Sitting in dark conference rooms watching these presentations, it was easy to lose sight of the real-life problems of people with dementia and their caregivers. Read more »
Without Warning™, a program of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center in Chicago, provides support and fellowship for people with early-onset Alzheimer's disease and their caregivers. The group began in 2004 and has grown to about thirty-five families since its inception. Read more »
In a small room in Roxbury, Connecticut, a man sits at his desk, hunched over. He has graying hair; he's about the age of seventy. Many may actually recognize him as Arthur Miller, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Bewildered and confused, he stares at his picture that appears on the back of a book. This book is none other than The Crucible, a play that he himself had written, 40 years ago. Yet he does not seem to recognize this play, nor does he remember that he is a writer. Why? Read more »
Susan grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and attended the liberal arts college Austin College in Sherman, Texas, as an undergraduate. She studied English and International Studies, traveled to Australia, Quebec, and Central America, and served as the editor of the college newspaper for a year and a half. Read more »
Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road is not, like most literature and movies of its kind, set in a sci-fi future. No fancy flying machines slice across the sky, no pneumatic doors whoosh open allowing entry to clones or robots. In fact, the remnants of civilization as we know it are contemporary, even ordinary ones: shopping carts and backpacks and a few cans of food. It is this world, our world, which has become a devastated wasteland. And the novel never reveals what happened. Read more »
I hope this edition of Crossings finds you in good spirits, deeply connected with friends and loved ones. Last year Memory Bridge launched our new Memory Bridge website ( www.memorybridge.org), began to disseminate our Memory Bridge school program across the United States, and debuted our PBS documentary There Is a Bridge. We have received overwhelmingly supportive feedback about There Is a Bridge from around the world. Here is a sample of what folks are saying: Read more »
According to The Alliance for Aging Research (2001), Americans are more afraid of Alzheimer's disease than they are of dying. I find that statistic remarkable. How have a majority of Americans come to imagine that they would rather die than have Alzheimer's disease? The answer--through metaphors: We imagine Alzheimer's disease as a fate worse than death because the disease has been presented to us through metaphors that evoke the terrifying. Read more »
The Chicago Memory Bridge program is currently beginning its sixth successful semester of educating at-risk junior high and high school students about how to communicate in emotionally meaningful ways with people with Alzheimer's disease. The program teaches students listening, verbal, and non-verbal skills that help them form relationships with their "Buddies": individuals with Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia living in nearby long-term care facilities. The students and their Buddies visit four times in 12 weeks, which allows them to really get to know one another. What follows is an example of how these "Buddy" experiences can grow to surpass even the confines of illness. Read more »
Margaret is originally from Northbrook, Illinois, and received a B.A. in Spanish Language, Literature, and Culture from Syracuse University. Her interest in intergenerational work and the creation of communities stems directly from her work after college. Read more »
Meeting of Minds is a program for people with early-stage memory loss offered by the South Central Wisconsin Chapter of the Alzheimer's Association. Twice a week, group members do tai chi-based exercises and collectively create poetry. Read more »
Memory Bridge is deeply interested in how cultural assumptions about memory and identity affect people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The way we imagine all sort of "realities," including other people, is always influenced by the social and cultural forces that shape and shift our world. For that reason, we are building our bridges with an attentive ear to and eye on the cultural assumptions and practices that impinge, however indirectly, on the lived experiences of people with dementia. Kim Bell, English teacher at Lake Forest Academy, has agreed to share with us her ongoing personal reflections about memory in literary and pop culture in America. We found the insights of her essay on The Sopranos profoundly stimulating and trust you will, too. Read more »
Like nearly every other television show of its caliber, Mad Men—a series about the glossy world of advertising in the early ’60s—explores the role of memory in fascinating ways. Don Draper, the handsome star of the show, has rejected his past in order to invent a new life for himself. He is as successful in this pursuit as he is as a partner in his advertising firm; in fact, the Life of Don Draper is probably his most persuasive advertising campaign. It’s slick and sexy, city and suburban, and—as we know by the multitude of women he attracts (this viewer included)—has a wide appeal. However, a façade is always just that, and, as the narrative develops, more and more elements of Don’s past life disrupt the linear flow of the story, as well as Don’s ability to remain present to his family, his co-workers, and himself. Read more »
Although Sue and I enjoyed getting to know one another, her lack of interest in group-based cognitive activities persisted. A home visit was arranged, allowing me to connect with Sue on a more personal level in her home environment, where we played games and perused her photos and books. Sue sustained interest and actively participated without signs of apathy or frustration. She especially cottoned to reading aloud and assuming the role of teacher—having been a first-grade teacher for many years—while I assumed the role of student. This visit reinforced for me the magic that happens when activities and facilitators resonate with individuals' unique abilities and emotional needs.
For my next visit at the respite program, I brought a copy of A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein, dubious that Sue would feel comfortable reading the poems aloud to a group. To everyone's surprise, Sue prompted me to lean closer so that together we could flip through the pages. Read more »
When a person with dementia does something that might be annoying to you but isn't hurting anyone, we call that "so what behavior.”
So what if it happens, it's not the end of the world. Read more »
Attention is chemistry. When we pay attention to someone, attend to him deeply, when we recieve him into our hearts without judgment or qualifying conditions, attend to someone in (let us call it what it is) love, impossible things become possible: chemicals of the spirit are catalyzed. The one to whom we attend experiences in our receiving presence an invitation to come out--to come out from behind the layers of disguise that she has adopted over a lifetime to keep herself safe from those whose attention to her was shallow, self-serving, exploitive. By giving ourself to another attentively, we invite him or her to enter into a new way of being, a new way of being together, really--into a new world. This world, the one we create between and among ourselves by attending to each other for the sake, and only for the sake, of each other, is the only real real world there is.
My experiences with people with dementia have amplified the truth of this insight 100 times over. As oxygen reacts with hydrogen to become water, the oxygen of our attention reacts with the spirit of the one to whom we are attending to become a new, and renewing, source of life. I would like to share with you a story from the Memory Bridge Initiative that illustrates how this kind of chemistry occurs, and how lives are changed when it does…. Read more »
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