Saying Good-bye to Dorcas
It was at the beginning of October 2014 that Dorcas and I (Alice, her oldest stepdaughter) began working in earnest to prepare this book for publication. For six weeks I arrived at her apartment every weekday just after lunch. For those six weeks I read aloud to her all of the material she intended for the book. Some of it she had printed out and placed in thick three-ring binders; more was stored on her computer. And then there were the letters she had written to her family while she was in Africa; many of them she had already typed onto her computer and edited; others I eventually typed for her. She told me what she wanted to include in her book, and what she wanted to leave out. She admitted that there was much she hadn’t written down before her memories and abilities faded, but she was relieved and happy that she had captured so many of her memories before losing access to them in her own mind.
I had already heard or read some of what Dorcas wrote in the first decade of her eleven-and-a-half years at Landis Homes. For nine of those years I lived just a few miles away, and we had many adventures together during that period, beginning with her invitation, less than two months after I moved to her neighborhood, to accompany her to an Eastern Mennonite Missions East Africa reunion at Goshen College in Indiana. We shared the driving both ways, and on the way home we made a few detours. First we went to Scottdale, Pennsylvania, to visit the Mennonite Publishing House and wander around the town where my parents, Ted and Catherine, had spent the first decade of their marriage and where I and three of my four siblings had begun our lives. Then we went to Grantsville, Maryland, to visit the archives of the children’s home from which Catherine had been adopted as a baby. Finally we visited Lonaconing, Maryland, where Catherine had been born. That journey was our longest road trip—except for the first one we made together, in 1976, when I was eighteen. After the death of Ted’s mother, we drove a U-Haul truck loaded with my grandmother’s things from Sarasota, Florida, to Philadelphia. I don’t remember if Dorcas asked me or told me to go with her that time, but it was the beginning of a friendship I never imagined.
As the years passed in Lititz, I gradually spent more and more time with Dorcas. I don’t remember exactly when I started joining her for Sunday dinner and afternoon puzzling every weekend, but it was after I realized she needed more help but often didn’t ask for it until I was there, because, as she said, she didn’t want to bother me. I learned that it had become difficult for her to navigate the humanless telephone answering machines at offices and businesses (if you want this, press 1, if you want that, press 2), so I offered to make phone calls for her to schedule appointments or get information. At some point I began taking her to those appointments, and on shopping trips (and in the wintertime I would shop for her), especially after she stopped driving and gave her pickup truck to her brother Paul. Sometimes while we were out we would stop and have lunch at the Kingdom Buffet, a sort of Chinese smorgasbord, or at the Oregon Dairy Restaurant. These are just a very few of the places we went and things we did together.
In mid-November 2014, Dorcas fell backward while playing shuffleboard, which she had been doing nearly every Thursday morning for many years, even after she needed to lean on a cane and then on a walker. Nothing broke, but she was bruised and in pain. After receiving a call from a nurse, I came and stayed with her for the rest of the day. It was that evening that I learned the extent of the help this strong, independent, generous woman had come to need and, finally, want. Thereafter I was with her for part or all of nearly every day of the rest of her life, which I did not allow myself to imagine would come so soon.
The winter of 2014–2015 was a difficult one for Dorcas. She gradually recovered from her fall, but in mid-January, just before she was to move out of the apartment she had called home for eleven years, she became ill with the flu, which was followed by several other health problems over the next month and a half. She moved into nursing care and her physical health improved, and then it began to sink in for her that she would not be going back to her apartment.
I came every day Monday through Saturday at suppertime and stayed with her until bedtime, and on Sundays I arrived in time to go with her to a church service and stayed until suppertime. One evening in early March we went, as usual, to her room after supper. She was feeling rather low emotionally and expressed to me how hard it was that she was no longer able to do the things she used to do. She felt she was no longer needed and she wondered, apologetically, if “this” would “soon be over.”
I told her she did still have a purpose, a mission to complete for God: I needed her to help me finish publishing her book. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she considered this information—and then she seemed happy again. Every day after that, in one way or another I reminded her of our project and kept her apprised of its progress. I continued to read to her from the manuscript as I edited it and designed it into book pages. She seemed to grow stronger and to have more energy. She wanted to walk, so after dinner we would wander the halls of the east campus of Landis Homes. And when real spring weather finally arrived, we wandered outside. We found a few places that became favorite spots in which to sit and observe nature, and we would often stay until it began to grow dark.
In early June, Dorcas moved into another nursing unit at Landis Homes. Her new room looked out onto a lush courtyard filled with trees, plants, and flowers that was often visited by small creatures—an assortment of birds (including ducks and ducklings), squirrels, and a black and white cat. My sister Rita set up a bird feeder outside the room’s big windows, which led to hours of enjoyment not only for Dorcas as she watched from inside, but also for her neighbors, and me, as we spent many an afternoon and evening sitting with her in that courtyard.
Dorcas and I continued to enjoy long walks both inside and outside until the last couple of weeks of her life, when she tired more easily. Because she had rallied before, it did not occur to me that this change was anything but temporary. She’d been blowing her nose more often and experiencing occasional postnasal drip, which seemed to be an allergic response because she had no fever and had a history of seasonal allergies. I assumed that her fatigue was related, and the staff kept close tabs on her. We continued to enjoy our hours together, reading, talking, working on puzzles, and watching Phillies games on the TV in her room. She was so excited that they were winning more often, and she would sometimes stay up an hour or more past her usual bedtime to see the outcome of a game. One weekend evening in late July we went to an EMM East Africa reunion in the Harvest Room, which Dorcas agreed to attend as long as she didn’t “have to get up and say anything.” She enjoyed the fellowship and food at that gathering very much, including meeting the current medical director of Shirati Hospital, Dr. Bwire Chirangi. I am so grateful that Laura Kurtz thought to invite us to that gathering.
On Friday, August 7, 2015, I arrived at Landis Homes at about 5:00 P.M. Dorcas was seated where she always was when I arrived for supper, at a long table in the dining room. I could see that she had eaten a bowl of soup, but an intact sandwich remained on the plate in front of her. She communicated that she was still a little hungry but just wasn’t sure how to proceed. She talked about returning to the smaller unit she had lived in before moving to her current location, because she felt she would soon be needing more help and she remembered that most of the residents there had needed help with just about everything. Dorcas had moved two more times after leaving her apartment on February 2, but I made a mental note to contact the social worker about her concerns the following Monday.
After supper we walked to Dorcas’s room, where I told her how that morning I had uploaded the files for her book to the printer. It’s finished, I said. We did it! For the next couple of hours we sat at the card table in her room, on which we had started a new puzzle the night before, and looked at the book’s cover and pages on my computer. I read the back cover to her again, and the entire table of contents. We looked at every photo, and I read aloud the bits of text that the photos illustrated. She nodded and laughed and launched into telling the rest of the stories as she now remembered them.
When we were finished, she turned toward me and said, “I couldn’t do it, so you did it for me.”
“But you wrote it,” I reminded her. “I just organized it and put it all together so that others can read and enjoy it.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” she continued. “When you are here I can make sense of things, because you take the time to help me think things through. But I know you can’t be here all the time, because you have many, many other things to do.”
As I’ve recalled those words again and again in the weeks since, it has seemed to me that she wasn’t just telling me I needed to go home and wash the dishes and clean the bathroom. Now her words seem like a release, a well-done, a “Go forward!” (see the meditation by Chaplain Jim Leaman at the end of this chapter), a good-bye.
Dorcas then wanted to work a little more on the puzzle, so we played for about a half hour, until she said she was ready for bed. I rang the bell for the nurse to come and help her prepare.
During the first four months that Dorcas lived in nursing care, I would leave for home after someone had come to help her get ready for bed. I would hug her good night as they headed into the bathroom. The second night of Dorcas’s stay in the last room she called home, she asked if I would wait to leave until she had gotten into bed. “Of course,” I said. When she came back from the bathroom, she apologized for asking me to do something more when, according to her, I already did so much for her. I told her it was nothing at all to stay five more minutes, and I did so thereafter without being asked. I would wait for her just inside the room, and when she returned with the nurse I would give her a hug before she crawled into the bed. Usually I would have to ask her, “Can I have my good-night hug?” to get her attention. The nurse would then tuck her in and read to her the two scripture verses we had stumbled upon a few months before when she was having trouble sleeping:
That last night, when Dorcas came in from the bathroom, I was still over by the window, putting my computer into my backpack. I turned to look at her and instead of heading for the bed she had stopped and was looking at me as though to say, “Where’s my hug?” I got up quickly and obliged. She hugged back. After the rest of the bed-time ritual was carried out and before the nurse left, Dorcas asked for an additional blanket. She was cold. We covered her with the warm fleece blanket that usually hung over the back of her rocking chair—a blanket I had brought to her apartment one night during the winter when I had stayed over. I had left it there and she had found it and put it on her own bed.
I was about to turn and leave the room when Dorcas got my attention. The nurse left and I went to the head of the bed to hear better what Dorcas was saying. She asked if I could leave a little extra light on in the room. I turned on the night-light on the lamp next to her bed, but she said it was too much. I adjusted the digital picture frame on the window seat across the room, and she said that helped. I told her I would also leave the curtain open to let in a little extra light from the hallway. I then leaned down and put my forehead next to hers and said, “Good-night, Dorcas. See you tomorrow.” I did not know that I was really saying good-bye.
Two hours later I received from the nurse the phone call I had never allowed myself to imagine.
We—family and friends—said our formal good-bye to Dorcas at a funeral service held in the West Bethany Chapel at Landis Homes on the morning of Thursday, August 13. Dorcas’s son Ben, my “little” brother, gave one of the tributes. Her sister Anna gave another. With their permission I have shared their tributes here. A third tribute was read by a representative from Eastern Mennonite Missions, and that too is included. A condensed version of the message that Chaplain Jim Leaman gave closes the chapter.
I had already heard or read some of what Dorcas wrote in the first decade of her eleven-and-a-half years at Landis Homes. For nine of those years I lived just a few miles away, and we had many adventures together during that period, beginning with her invitation, less than two months after I moved to her neighborhood, to accompany her to an Eastern Mennonite Missions East Africa reunion at Goshen College in Indiana. We shared the driving both ways, and on the way home we made a few detours. First we went to Scottdale, Pennsylvania, to visit the Mennonite Publishing House and wander around the town where my parents, Ted and Catherine, had spent the first decade of their marriage and where I and three of my four siblings had begun our lives. Then we went to Grantsville, Maryland, to visit the archives of the children’s home from which Catherine had been adopted as a baby. Finally we visited Lonaconing, Maryland, where Catherine had been born. That journey was our longest road trip—except for the first one we made together, in 1976, when I was eighteen. After the death of Ted’s mother, we drove a U-Haul truck loaded with my grandmother’s things from Sarasota, Florida, to Philadelphia. I don’t remember if Dorcas asked me or told me to go with her that time, but it was the beginning of a friendship I never imagined.
As the years passed in Lititz, I gradually spent more and more time with Dorcas. I don’t remember exactly when I started joining her for Sunday dinner and afternoon puzzling every weekend, but it was after I realized she needed more help but often didn’t ask for it until I was there, because, as she said, she didn’t want to bother me. I learned that it had become difficult for her to navigate the humanless telephone answering machines at offices and businesses (if you want this, press 1, if you want that, press 2), so I offered to make phone calls for her to schedule appointments or get information. At some point I began taking her to those appointments, and on shopping trips (and in the wintertime I would shop for her), especially after she stopped driving and gave her pickup truck to her brother Paul. Sometimes while we were out we would stop and have lunch at the Kingdom Buffet, a sort of Chinese smorgasbord, or at the Oregon Dairy Restaurant. These are just a very few of the places we went and things we did together.
In mid-November 2014, Dorcas fell backward while playing shuffleboard, which she had been doing nearly every Thursday morning for many years, even after she needed to lean on a cane and then on a walker. Nothing broke, but she was bruised and in pain. After receiving a call from a nurse, I came and stayed with her for the rest of the day. It was that evening that I learned the extent of the help this strong, independent, generous woman had come to need and, finally, want. Thereafter I was with her for part or all of nearly every day of the rest of her life, which I did not allow myself to imagine would come so soon.
The winter of 2014–2015 was a difficult one for Dorcas. She gradually recovered from her fall, but in mid-January, just before she was to move out of the apartment she had called home for eleven years, she became ill with the flu, which was followed by several other health problems over the next month and a half. She moved into nursing care and her physical health improved, and then it began to sink in for her that she would not be going back to her apartment.
I came every day Monday through Saturday at suppertime and stayed with her until bedtime, and on Sundays I arrived in time to go with her to a church service and stayed until suppertime. One evening in early March we went, as usual, to her room after supper. She was feeling rather low emotionally and expressed to me how hard it was that she was no longer able to do the things she used to do. She felt she was no longer needed and she wondered, apologetically, if “this” would “soon be over.”
I told her she did still have a purpose, a mission to complete for God: I needed her to help me finish publishing her book. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she considered this information—and then she seemed happy again. Every day after that, in one way or another I reminded her of our project and kept her apprised of its progress. I continued to read to her from the manuscript as I edited it and designed it into book pages. She seemed to grow stronger and to have more energy. She wanted to walk, so after dinner we would wander the halls of the east campus of Landis Homes. And when real spring weather finally arrived, we wandered outside. We found a few places that became favorite spots in which to sit and observe nature, and we would often stay until it began to grow dark.
In early June, Dorcas moved into another nursing unit at Landis Homes. Her new room looked out onto a lush courtyard filled with trees, plants, and flowers that was often visited by small creatures—an assortment of birds (including ducks and ducklings), squirrels, and a black and white cat. My sister Rita set up a bird feeder outside the room’s big windows, which led to hours of enjoyment not only for Dorcas as she watched from inside, but also for her neighbors, and me, as we spent many an afternoon and evening sitting with her in that courtyard.
Dorcas and I continued to enjoy long walks both inside and outside until the last couple of weeks of her life, when she tired more easily. Because she had rallied before, it did not occur to me that this change was anything but temporary. She’d been blowing her nose more often and experiencing occasional postnasal drip, which seemed to be an allergic response because she had no fever and had a history of seasonal allergies. I assumed that her fatigue was related, and the staff kept close tabs on her. We continued to enjoy our hours together, reading, talking, working on puzzles, and watching Phillies games on the TV in her room. She was so excited that they were winning more often, and she would sometimes stay up an hour or more past her usual bedtime to see the outcome of a game. One weekend evening in late July we went to an EMM East Africa reunion in the Harvest Room, which Dorcas agreed to attend as long as she didn’t “have to get up and say anything.” She enjoyed the fellowship and food at that gathering very much, including meeting the current medical director of Shirati Hospital, Dr. Bwire Chirangi. I am so grateful that Laura Kurtz thought to invite us to that gathering.
On Friday, August 7, 2015, I arrived at Landis Homes at about 5:00 P.M. Dorcas was seated where she always was when I arrived for supper, at a long table in the dining room. I could see that she had eaten a bowl of soup, but an intact sandwich remained on the plate in front of her. She communicated that she was still a little hungry but just wasn’t sure how to proceed. She talked about returning to the smaller unit she had lived in before moving to her current location, because she felt she would soon be needing more help and she remembered that most of the residents there had needed help with just about everything. Dorcas had moved two more times after leaving her apartment on February 2, but I made a mental note to contact the social worker about her concerns the following Monday.
After supper we walked to Dorcas’s room, where I told her how that morning I had uploaded the files for her book to the printer. It’s finished, I said. We did it! For the next couple of hours we sat at the card table in her room, on which we had started a new puzzle the night before, and looked at the book’s cover and pages on my computer. I read the back cover to her again, and the entire table of contents. We looked at every photo, and I read aloud the bits of text that the photos illustrated. She nodded and laughed and launched into telling the rest of the stories as she now remembered them.
When we were finished, she turned toward me and said, “I couldn’t do it, so you did it for me.”
“But you wrote it,” I reminded her. “I just organized it and put it all together so that others can read and enjoy it.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” she continued. “When you are here I can make sense of things, because you take the time to help me think things through. But I know you can’t be here all the time, because you have many, many other things to do.”
As I’ve recalled those words again and again in the weeks since, it has seemed to me that she wasn’t just telling me I needed to go home and wash the dishes and clean the bathroom. Now her words seem like a release, a well-done, a “Go forward!” (see the meditation by Chaplain Jim Leaman at the end of this chapter), a good-bye.
Dorcas then wanted to work a little more on the puzzle, so we played for about a half hour, until she said she was ready for bed. I rang the bell for the nurse to come and help her prepare.
During the first four months that Dorcas lived in nursing care, I would leave for home after someone had come to help her get ready for bed. I would hug her good night as they headed into the bathroom. The second night of Dorcas’s stay in the last room she called home, she asked if I would wait to leave until she had gotten into bed. “Of course,” I said. When she came back from the bathroom, she apologized for asking me to do something more when, according to her, I already did so much for her. I told her it was nothing at all to stay five more minutes, and I did so thereafter without being asked. I would wait for her just inside the room, and when she returned with the nurse I would give her a hug before she crawled into the bed. Usually I would have to ask her, “Can I have my good-night hug?” to get her attention. The nurse would then tuck her in and read to her the two scripture verses we had stumbled upon a few months before when she was having trouble sleeping:
Dorcas would always close her eyes as these verses were read, then she would say, “Thank-you.” I would say another good-night and leave the room, followed by the nurse, who would pull closed the curtain that separated her “semi-private” room from the foyer of the suite she shared with another resident—a woman with whom she had graduated from Lancaster Mennonite School many years before."When I lie down, I go to sleep in peace; you alone, O Lord, keep me perfectly safe." Psalm 4:8
"And God's peace, which is far beyond human understanding, will keep your hearts and minds safe in union with Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:7
That last night, when Dorcas came in from the bathroom, I was still over by the window, putting my computer into my backpack. I turned to look at her and instead of heading for the bed she had stopped and was looking at me as though to say, “Where’s my hug?” I got up quickly and obliged. She hugged back. After the rest of the bed-time ritual was carried out and before the nurse left, Dorcas asked for an additional blanket. She was cold. We covered her with the warm fleece blanket that usually hung over the back of her rocking chair—a blanket I had brought to her apartment one night during the winter when I had stayed over. I had left it there and she had found it and put it on her own bed.
I was about to turn and leave the room when Dorcas got my attention. The nurse left and I went to the head of the bed to hear better what Dorcas was saying. She asked if I could leave a little extra light on in the room. I turned on the night-light on the lamp next to her bed, but she said it was too much. I adjusted the digital picture frame on the window seat across the room, and she said that helped. I told her I would also leave the curtain open to let in a little extra light from the hallway. I then leaned down and put my forehead next to hers and said, “Good-night, Dorcas. See you tomorrow.” I did not know that I was really saying good-bye.
Two hours later I received from the nurse the phone call I had never allowed myself to imagine.
We—family and friends—said our formal good-bye to Dorcas at a funeral service held in the West Bethany Chapel at Landis Homes on the morning of Thursday, August 13. Dorcas’s son Ben, my “little” brother, gave one of the tributes. Her sister Anna gave another. With their permission I have shared their tributes here. A third tribute was read by a representative from Eastern Mennonite Missions, and that too is included. A condensed version of the message that Chaplain Jim Leaman gave closes the chapter.
~ Alice S. Morrow Rowan in Begin by Loving Again: My Safari from Farm Girl to Missionary Doctor to Wife and Mother, by Dorcas L. Stoltzfus Morrow, M.D. (Not Forgotten Publications, October 2015), pp. 495–499. Copyright © 2015 by Alice S. Morrow Rowan.
Comments
Post a Comment