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Page 2A -- Addison Independent, Thursday, December 14, 2006
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Poet remembers mother's final lucid talks By Megan James | |
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VERGENNES -- During the last 14 months of Ruth Klein's life, her daughter Deanna Shapiro, a poet and artist, wrote down every conversation the two had at Helen Porter Healthcare and Rehabilitation's Dementia Unit. Those conversations, tracking klein's painful but often lighthearted decline into Alzheimer's disease, became the backbone of Shapiro's new book, "Conversations at the Nuring Home: A mother, a daughter and Alzheimer's."
Shapiro spoke to an overflowing audience at Bixby Memorial Library in Vergennes last Wednesday about her family's experience with the progressive brain disease and her own process of transforming that experience into her first full-lenth book. She also used the appearance to publicly thank the employees of Helen Porter, who she said made all the difference in her mother's final days. "Vermont has been very good to us, and Vermont was very good to my mother," Shapiro said. "Helen Porter Healthcare and Rehab was also marvelous to my mother. And that's why this book is dedicated not only to my mother, but to the staff at Porter." Shapiro brought her 92-year-old mother to Vermont and found her a place at Jim Ringer Home Care in Vergennes, close to where she and her husband, Charlie, lived in Ferrisburgh. The deterioration of her mind had begun two years earlier when she lived in Westchester County, N.Y. Klein had been complaining about her neighbors, who she said had a child who could be heard through the walls whining all day about how bored he was. She said his parents were singers and made noise all the time. But when she asked other neighbors about it, they all said they heard nothing. And when Shapiro visited, she, too, heard nothing. "Isn't it funny?" Klein told her daughter. "I wear a hearing aid, and I hear them and you don't." Shapiro realized her mother was having hallucinations and needed more care than she was able to give in her sporadic visis to New York. It wasn't until Klein went to the hospital after falling and breaking her pelvis that doctors at Porter determined she was experiencing brain damage. They could not diagnose her with Alzheimer's explicitly, but they recognized enough symptoms to admit her to the Dementia Unit. That's when the conversations began. |
DEANNA SHAPIRO
Shapiro recorded a total of 70 conversations, some hostile and disorienting, some surprisingly lucid and beautiful. The mother and daughter talked about Klein's neighbor, Tim, whose mental state had deteriorated much more than hers, and about the art classes Klein reluctantly attended, where she produced paintings Shapiro later had framed and brought to the Bixby talk.
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