Yesterday was my grandmother’s birthday. She’s the pretty young woman with the cute little boy on her lap.
She was born in 1912 and grew up on her beloved Nebraska ranch, where she lived most of her life. My cousin said of her, “She was the gentlest cowgirl you ever did know.”
She wrote three family history books on a typewriter and did the research on her own… before there were computers.
She recorded books for the blind. That’s what it was called back then.
She was a community member and neighbor in the purest sense of the word.
She loved to laugh, and she loved her family.
And when her cognitive skills began to change, she got moved from her independent living to an assisted living.
In that assisted living, I became concerned that she was spending far too much time in her recliner and far too much time in her apartment by herself. She was losing ground, and it troubled me.
Her abilities changed more, and her next move was to a nursing home.
While there, she told my brother, “Get me out of here.”
You see, my grandmother faded from this life like many people experiencing dementia still do.
She was the same woman, but in an environment where the people didn’t understand that she just needed someone else to access the beauty and the abilities she still possessed.
The DAWN Method let me understand how to be that person who brings out the abilities and the person who remains when cognitive skills are changing.
Spending my days with people experiencing dementia and coaching and teaching their families has changed my life for the better.
And it prepared me to help my dad, the handsome little boy on my grandmother’s lap, journey well through dementia and finish well with dementia. Still himself, safe and clean and comfortable in his own home. We made his changing abilities of little consequence.
I promised myself when my grandmother died in 2003 that I would not let another person journey through dementia like she did. I’m grateful, so grateful, that the DAWN Method taught me how to keep that promise.