Author: Heidi Hickethier

Immanuel Lutheran Communities couldn’t run without its staff.  This seems like an obvious statement.  But we don’t want it to leave it at that; we want to recognize the people who go out of their way to make seniors’ lives better.  And we want to do it by making their lives better.

Our community is full of women and men who work hard, every day, to make Immanuel a wonderful place to live.  Everyone from housekeepers to nursing assistants to dining room servers knows the residents, their needs, and their preferences.  Just yesterday I got to eat lunch with my grandfather in the Claremont Restaurant, and I was delighted (though not surprised) to observe just how much Rachel, our server, knows about his preferences.  He didn’t even have to ask for his hot chocolate or his black cherry frozen yogurt.  She knew what he would want, confirmed it, and brought it.

I am telling you this story because it shows the small ways in which our staff members work to make our residents feel special, and it shows how special our staff members are.  We recognize the contributions these special people make partly by helping them pay for school.

Like all retirement communities, Immanuel relies on a large contingent of lower-paid staff, including CNAs, housekeepers, and maintenance technicians as well as servers like Rachel.  Many of these employees would like to grow in their professional lives, so the opportunity to get some help paying for education helps them make the changes they want to make.  Money from the Employee Education Fund has helped CNAs to become LPNs, LPNs to become RNs, employees in other departments to gain credentials in a wide variety of fields.  Many of them choose to stay and work at Immanuel, and they continue to provide superb customer service and care to the residents who call this community home.

Lately, so many employees have chosen to apply for education funding that we are not able to fund all requests at full capacity.  We would like to help our employees more, and to that, we need help from you.  By designating your gift to the employee education fund, you can make a difference in the lives of those who make a difference to our residents every day.

I have something to confess.  I was an English major.  (Oh no!  You gasp.  Everyone knows humanities majors are weird.  I guess since you’re the grant writer it’s okay?)  But, it’s even worse than that.  I went to grad school in English and I hold a Ph.D.  I even taught for a few years after finishing.  In the midst of a career change like this, it’s easy to think that none of what I learned in all those years of education will be useful.  But I often find myself making connections between some of the most abstract topics I’ve studied and day-to-day life in a retirement community.

One of the most striking of these connections has to do with structural linguistics as outlined by French philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure.  Structuralism actually has a lot of applications to everyday life (just trust me), but the one that’s been on my mind lately has to do with dementia.  For a lot of reasons, dementia is difficult and scary for the person experiencing it and the people observing the change.  One day awhile back a colleague told me about a resident who, at dinner time, tried to eat her soup with her fork instead of her spoon.   At first, I thought this was just sad and frankly kind of weird; after all, the resident remembered that utensils are for eating.  But then I started thinking about this story using a structuralist lens.  My fellow English majors—at least those who studied theory—are probably nodding their heads, but the rest of you might be wondering what on earth I’m talking about.  That’s okay.  If you’ll bear with me, I’ll explain—and then, I promise, I’ll also explain what it has to do with dementia.

Saussurian structural linguistics posits that language is composed of signs.  To simplify radically, a sign is a word.  But in structural linguistics, a word is more than a collection of letters.  Signs consist of both the collection of letters (say, “chair”) and the concept behind the collection of letters (so, a thing used primarily for sitting on, with four legs, a seat, and probably a back).  Saussure called these two parts the “signifier” and the “signified.”  Every sign is comprised of both a signifier and a signified, and the two parts are inseparable (try thinking of a chair without thinking of the sounds and letters c-h-a-i-r; you almost certainly can’t).  We understand each other when we talk because we all agree on which signifiers match which signifieds.  Because signs aren’t just words, we also know what to do when we encounter their physical manifestation; we sit in chairs.

Saussure also described the concept of sign systems.  All languages are sign systems, and there are sign systems that aren’t languages.  In systems, signs are arbitrary and relational.  Which is to say, there’s no reason why c-h-a-i-r is a thing we sit on accept that it always has been.  Also, we understand chairs in relation to tables, stools, couches, and other items in the general sign system “furniture.”  Chairs are different from all of these other things, and we know what chairs are for, and therefore what the sign “chair” means, in no small part because we understand how they are different from other things.

You might well ask, “What does all this have to do with a resident eating soup with a fork?”.  Well, the resident still understood the sign system “utensils.”  What she didn’t understand was the specific sign “spoon” and how it differs from “fork.”  As dementia progresses, we lose our understanding of specific signs before we lose our understanding of sign systems.  In this instance, academic theory I studied in the past helped me make sense out a confusing event in my present.  Structuralism is a way of understanding language and our relationship to it, and it can also help us understand the process we undergo when our understanding of language breaks down.

Today I’d like to share a story that Hannah, our Recreation Director for Independent and Assisted Living, told me about something that happened in her department.  Each year at Easter, the Recreation team offers residents and staff the opportunity to purchase “Bunnygrams.”  For $3, a bunny-suit-clad Recreation team member will deliver a chocolate bunny and an Easter greeting to any resident or staff member the purchaser chooses.  The proceeds from Bunnygrams go to the Resident Care Fund.

Several weeks before Easter, just after the Bunnygram announcement went out, Polly and Peter—both independent residents–stopped by Hannah’s office.  Between them, they purchased Bunnygrams for all 24 residents in the Lodge at Buffalo Hill, our Memory Support community.

Polly and Peter both have personal experience with people with dementia.  Polly was a caregiver to someone with Alzheimer ’s disease, and Peter is a retired pastor who has counseled numerous families.  He’s also had close friends with dementia.  They know from experience how much little things matter in the daily lives of those with memory loss, and they took it upon themselves to provide one of those little things.  By giving Bunnygrams, Polly and Peter gave moments of joy to 24 people who are experiencing one of the most difficult effects of aging.

But the care Polly and Peter exhibited with the Bunnygrams goes beyond the Lodge.  At the same time they gave moments of joy to the Lodge residents, they gave nearly $50 to the residents of the Skilled Care Center (enough to cover unreimbursed Medicaid costs for one resident for one day).  Their small act of generosity flows through our entire community.  Polly and Peter bought Bunnygrams because they cared about the Lodge residents, and because Hannah structured the program with philanthropy in mind, the whole community benefits.

Polly and Peter’s generosity is just one example of the caring community we’ve built here at Immanuel.  Everyone from the staff who conceived of the Bunnygrams to the residents who purchased them in bulk thought carefully about how to make the lives of others better.  Small moments of joy matter, and a small gift can make a big difference in the lives of those who live here.