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  123 Chapter 7 From the Top of the Ferris Wheel Breaking Barriers We would drive her here and there, just to get her out of there. It’s so difficult to break people out. She had severe osteoporosis so she could barely move, but she wanted to get out. She counted on one sister coming to get her once a week, and me once a month. It would exhaust her, but she lived for it. —Gay Hanna, on her mother’s nursing home experience “I forgot how big the sky is” My friend Lynne’s aunt had lived in a nursing home for only a few months. But her world had rapidly shrunk. The cloistered institution had already clouded her memory of the wide Kansas sky she had known all her life. On her first outing, she looked around in amazement. Lynne cried when she told me this story. Her aunt’s comment captured all the painful loss that accompanies life in a nursing home. Later I would visit the place where Lynne’s mother and aunt lived—the typical one-story brick building in a small town. The room Lynne’s mother shared with a stranger was impossibly tiny, with enough space only for two narrow beds and bureaus. Although it was a sunny summer afternoon, the building seemed dark and too quiet. The one note of levity, a 1950s-style ice cream parlor, only accented the sad surroundings. The staff was kind to her mother and aunt, Lynne said, but there was little to keep residents engaged, happy—or able to remember how big the sky is. The scene not far away at Crestview, in rural Missouri, could not have been more different. There, under the leadership of Eric and Margie Haider, staff members broke through the customary barriers between those 124 Old Age in a New Age living inside a nursing home and the outside world. “Ninety-five percent of nursing homes assume that if you’re ninety, you’re going to love to play bingo for a banana,” said Eric. “Maybe I want to play bingo for five hundred dollars at a bingo parlor. Take me there! Take me to a casino! What crime have they done that they’ve lost this privilege? We ask them what they want to do.” The staff I interviewed at Crestview were enthusiastic, even volunteering to accompany residents on outings after work hours. Eric said that he had a waiting list of eighty potential employees, thanks to word of mouth. When aides at other homes hear that their counterparts at Crestview get paid to go fishing with residents, he said, they too want to work there. “My employees are my best advertisement,” he said. Most Crestview employees had driver’s licenses and were encouraged to take residents out. Crestview paid a small extra insurance premium to cover them. Charlie, a tall, lanky guy with a hangdog expression and drooping mustache , was a prime instigator. One of his favorite stories was of the time he invited residents to go to the Harrison County fair. He went three times, taking as many people as he could. One evening, when they got to the rides, some wanted to go on the merry-go-round. “One little lady, I got her on the Ferris wheel, and they stopped us up on top,” Charlie recalled. “I said, ‘Elsie, I was doing pretty good until they did this.’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Elsie, how long’s it been since you been on a Ferris wheel?’ She said, ‘Charlie, I ain’t never been on a Ferris wheel.’ She was a hundred years old.” I love the image of Charlie and hundred-year-old Elsie stuck on top of the Ferris wheel, the seat swinging lightly as they gaze out over the midway. The scene is so life affirming, joyful, spontaneous. Elsie challenges every notion we have about who lives in nursing homes. The staff insisted that many residents were eager for adventure, even as their families were convinced their loved ones were “too far gone.” Even those on the “heavy care unit”—those who were the most debilitated—enjoyed getting out. One aide on the unit invited residents to go out on a lake on her brother’s pontoon boat. “Well, you don’t have any trouble finding volunteers—if you say you’re going to do something like that, these people will jump,” Charlie said. “We went two times. That’s twenty-seven miles...

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