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’.
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.”
About a month before our first Mother’s Day at Friends for Life, I got a call from a nursing home. Could we provide corsages for all the female residents? Well, I had no money and didn’t even know how to make a corsage.
I got a call one day from the activity director at a nursing home. She said, “There is a man here who is going to die, I think, if you can’t help him.”