Tovertafel: Magic Table!

Tovertafel creator Hester Le Riche spent months of her life with dementia patients, developing and fine-tuning her therapeutic magic light table.

"Le Riche wanted to make something that would be in the care home’s main area, that could be done in groups and that required no special supervision. She soon settled on light as the perfect medium: energising, attention-grabbing, clean and completely safe."

Film: It's about love...

So great it deserves it's own post. In the last scene of the movie Still Alice, daughter Lydia (Kristen Stewart) is reading from Tony Kushner's play "Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" to her Mom, Alice (Julianne Moore):

Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America.
God! It's been years since I was on a plane.
When we hit 35,000 feet we'll have reached the tropopause...
The great belt of calm air.
As close as I'll ever get to the ozone.
I dreamed we were there.
The plane leapt the tropopause...
the safe air and attained the outer rim...
the ozone which was ragged and torn...
patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth
and that was...
frightening.
But I saw something only I could see...
because of my astonishing ability to see such things.
Souls were rising...
from the earth far below...
souls of the dead of people who'd
perished from...
famine, from war, from the plague...
and they floated up like skydivers in reverse.
limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning.
And the souls of these departed
joined hands...
clasped ankles and formed a web,
a great net of souls.
And the souls were three atom oxygen
molecules of the stuff of ozone...
and the outer rim absorbed them
and was repaired.
Nothing's lost forever.
In this world, there is a kind of
painful progress.
Longing for what we've left behind and...
dreaming ahead.
At least I think that's so
That's it.
Hey.
Did you like that?
Hmm, what I just read.
#Did you hate it?

[Alice mumbles incoherently]
[Alice continues mumbling]

What...
What was it about?
Love.
#Love.
Yeah mom.
It was about love.
The End @
STILL ALICE

Alzheimer's Poem: Owen Darnell

After musing about the movie Still Alice, I will now explain the poem part.. first the poem:


Do not ask me to remember,
or try to make me understand,
Let me rest and know you're with me,
Kiss my cheek and hold my hand,
I'm confused beyond your concept,
I am sad and sick and lost,
All I know is that I need you to be with me at all cost,
Do not lose your patience with me,
Do not scold or shun my cry,
I can't help the way I'm living,
Can't be different though I try,
Just remember that I need you,
That the best of me is gone,
Please don't fail to stand beside me,
Love me till my life is done.


I had most recently seen the poem posted on Richard Branson's blog. Thankfully he credited the author! I found an online article from the 14 June, 1996, Orlando, Florida Sentinel Newspaper written by Bo Poertner about Owen Darnell;


"A few months before Esther Darnell died of Alzheimer's disease, she sat in a nursing home and studied her husband's face as if it held some great mystery.

Owen Darnell, 74, of Daytona Beach was all too familiar with his wife's puzzled look. It was the same one he saw when she struggled to read the clock or to understand the TV news.

Esther had been a beautiful, loving and intelligent companion. She had studied at Columbia University and had earned graduate degrees in pharmacology and natural sciences at the University of Havana in Cuba. She had taught high school math.

But the disease gradually tangled her thinking and erased her memory.
....


Owen Darnell wrote about his experience in caring for his wife in a 26-page booklet titled A Room Without Doors. I don't know if he's still alive today, but I'm sure he'd be happy to see this:


A Caregiver's Response by Albert Reinsch, Sr.

(This poem is a humble response to the inspirational and informative poem, An Alzheimer’s Request, by Owen Darnell.)

I shall do my best beloved,
To do all you've asked of me.
When I fail you must forgive me,
For where you are I cannot see.
What I know is that I love you,
More than the world can ever know.
Yet, so often I fail to show it,
I'm so ashamed that this be so.
Please forgive me for my failings,
It is not for lack of trying.
I know you need me to be strong,
But it's so hard when I am crying.
I, too, need you so much my darling,
Until we're renewed in heaven above.
Your smiles reward and give me courage,
Our hugs and kisses seal our love.