You could barely see her house from the road. She had not eaten a real meal in years. Her plumbing didn’t work. It had been several years since she had been able to cook or bathe. She was afraid to let anyone know she needed help so she withdrew inside her house and little problems [...]
Ida might have been our very first volunteer. I think she was 76 when she started volunteering with us. She adopted six grandmas in our Adopt a Grandparent Program. She was older than all of them. One of the ladies she adopted hadn’t spoken since she was 18 years old. Ida came by the office one day so excited to tell me she had found a way to communicate with her new friend – one blink for ‘yes’, two blinks for ‘no’.
We were asked to help an elderly widow move. She had been renting a house but her son had moved in with her. He was an alcoholic. He mistreated her terribly and when he ran out of money to buy alcohol he pawned her things. When we came to pick her up everything she owned [...]
She got up that day and fixed her hair. Spent time deciding just what she should wear. When she was content with herself once more, She wheeled to the lobby to wait by the door. She searched the faces of each one who came, Waiting for someone who’d call her by name. “Where are you [...]
I was visiting my father in the hospital one day when I heard a woman screaming. I went to see what was wrong and found a woman who was close to ninety years old. She was crying. She said, “I’m dying and I don’t want to die alone, please don’t leave me!” I stayed and [...]
I never heard of Huntington’s Disease until I met an tiny, elderly lady who had this horrible disease. It is a degenerative brain disorder that affects a person’s ability to walk, talk and think. Victims shake uncontrollably.
She was given a turkey for the holidays, but she didn’t have a stove. She really wanted to have a Christmas dinner, so she wrapped the turkey in foil and cooked it for twenty two hours on her space heater.
I received a call from Adult Protective Services in a neighboring county. “I know you don’t serve our county, but we have an elderly lady who is starving to death. There is no one else to take care of her. I’ll understand if you can’t help.”
In our first year at Friends for Life, we were asked to be the legal guardian for a man who had been found unconscious on a railroad track. He was living in a shed about the size of my office (which was pretty tiny).
I sent dozens of girls from a sorority at Baylor University to a nursing home one day to deliver stuffed animals to the ladies and balloons to the men. Later that day, I received a call from the social worker at the nursing home. She said, “Inez, I have to tell you something that happened after the girls left.”