Suspended Anticipation

Beatitudes, an Arizona retirement campus’s advanced-dementia unit, has become a model of innovations in caring for people who “have trouble thinking,” terminology used by the director of education and research at the Beatitudes campus. A recent article by Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker describes Beatitudes this way: “Often the advanced-dementia unit, with its pervasive quiet and its slow-moving, kindly staff, seemed like an anteroom to another realm, filled with people in a state of suspended anticipation.” 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/20/130520fa_fact_mead

This article caught my eye because I’m currently revising my out-of-print 1996 book of narratives, Tales from My Teachers on the Alzheimer’s Unit. I plan to launch it as an e-book called The Third Floor, Tales from Our Teachers. I, like the director at Beatitudes, often noticed that the elders with dementia, in the way they live in the immediate present, share a gift of truth with us. Many religions around the globe view being in the present moment as a spiritual practice. It is my hope that The Third Floor  will provide a window through which a reader can look through institutional walls into the unique lives of these teachers.

I’d welcome your comments about experiences in this vein, which you may have had with loved ones, or your thoughts on the New Yorker article, which you can read by clicking the link above.