They Still Teach Me

My process in writing Tales from My Teachers on the Alzheimer’s Unit was both lightning fast and haltingly slow. The story-catching happened while I was working full-time on the Alzheimer’s Unit, so I jotted notes during lunch, on breaks, on the bus. But the emotions stirred up in me by the residents whom I came to love as family, and by the daily vignettes I witnessed in their presence, those deepened at their own unfolding pace like flowers.
As I say in the preface to this book, the tales were initially a way for me to listen differently to those who were thought to have lost their communication skills, and to counter the institutional tendency to “write them off,” to see them as a diagnostic category or a problem to be solved. Writing this book helped me see them as whole. It put me in touch with the irrational side of human experience, with mystery. I found that elders with Alzheimer’s, living so immediately and completely in the present, have a spiritual gift to share. As witness and participant in these tales, I was gifted with a profound education.
It wasn’t an easy book to write, and it certainly wasn’t perceived as flattering by the institution in which I worked at the time. Now that nearly two decades have passed, the struggles don’t seem to matter. It is these teachers who for me have stood the test of time. They still teach me.