Thankful for a Place to Call Home

The Thanksgiving menu was posted in the kitchen in big black letters days in advance, so the “ladies,” as they are affectionately called, would not be caught unawares.

Without such gentle prodding, even major holidays would seem to come out of nowhere for the five residents of the coral pink Venice bungalow. The unusual board-and-care facility, known by the acronym HOME, is for women with Alzheimer’s disease and other memory-robbing conditions.

“You know today is turkey day, a holiday for everyone!” boomed Chela Jaurgeui, an aide, as she embraced one of the ladies, Ray, waltzing her to the dining room inch by inch. Ray, who is approaching 90 and seldom utters a word, was decked out in a glass-bead necklace, shiny clip-on earrings and a fresh hairdo. The barely susceptible nod that she gave in response spoke volumes.

A dinner table was set with white china, napkin rings of amber leaves, and yellow candlesticks in the shapes of corncobs for a noon meal of turkey and fixings and pumpkin pie. It was a traditional harvest celebration in every detail, except perhaps for the splash of tropical splendor in the birds-of-paradise centerpiece.

Although none of the ladies said anything about Thanksgiving over dinner, despite much cheerful prompting from the three aides and two caregiving daughters, that does not mean the occasion was lost on them. The cranberry sauce they ate, with its weird mealy tartness so keenly associated with this particular day, may well have stirred memories of Thanksgivings gone by, even if they could not put the elusive feeling into words.

“Something clicks with some of the women,” Linda Laisure, a social worker and advocate for the elderly, said Tuesday. She was away on vacation Thursday, the first Thanksgiving dinner she has missed at the facility since she founded it 10 years ago. “It’s important for the women to have a holiday,” she said. “We make a big deal out of it, and it can ignite something in their memory.”

For many Americans, of course, Thanksgiving is now a marathon of planning, a riot of nick-of-time travel, a great calendar-organizing principle around which scattered families spin and wheel at warp speed.

At HOME, the occasion is simplicity itself, a meal shared after a humble grace.

About the only invasion of pop culture into the otherwise rarefied day was the Macy’s parade, that annual cacophony of marching bands and Willard Scott shenanigans, which the women stared at briefly on the big living room TV.

Lillian Oliver flew in from Alabama, where she teaches at a private school, to celebrate with her mother, Agnes Oliver, who is 85. “It’s a real blessing she’s here,” Oliver said of her mother, who has been at the facility for nearly four years, after living for decades in Rustic Canyon. “It was hard for her to leave her house, but she gets much more personal attention now, with more people involved in her well-being.

“My mother has lost the ability to communicate verbally, but she’s there emotionally, and that’s how I connect with her. She responds to love, and the women who work here communicate with love.”

Oliver was watching her mother and an aide, Petra Brambila, play catch with a large round pillow in the sun-dappled backyard garden. “People have such a fear of ending up with Alzheimer’s, but you function as well as you can, you can still laugh,” Oliver said.

“There’s something more to being a person than an IQ level or a memory level. I know for sure there’s something more to a person aside from what they’ve lost.”

Laisure said that the key to the facility was its homeyness and simplicity. Those qualities were evident in the warm-colored easy chairs and sofas in the crowded living room, the bureaus in the bedrooms that were bedecked with framed photos, and the tub garden on the back deck, where plants were up to waist high so the ladies could water them--and invariably over-water them. “We let them,” Laisure said, “and then we just buy new plants.”

HOME, or Help Our Mobile Elderly, is a sharp contrast to the large nursing facilities that house most Alzheimer’s patients. The cost is $2,400 a month per resident, and the women have to be relatively free of major medical complications and be able to walk, if only with assistance, Laisure said. Three aides work during the day, two in the early evening and one overnight.

“This is an alternative to large institutional settings” for many elderly people, she said. “My goal is to show the government that we need to stop dumping money into nursing care for a population that doesn’t require it.”

James D’Andrea, a clinical psychologist with the Los Angeles Alzheimer’s Assn., said holidays typically put extra strain on families in which a loved one has the disease because “people spend so much time reminiscing.” The group offers booklets with tips on conducting holiday celebrations that include Alzheimer’s patients, such as holding meals early in the day and reviewing names and faces in photographs ahead of time.

Sheila Hutman, a technical writer in West Los Angeles, arranged for her mother, Bessie Weinstein, to live at the facility four years ago after checking out 50 others. She said that her mother had taken care of both of her parents in large institutions, “places with long halls and a smell of urine.” Her mother would have loathed to be in such a place, whether she could express it or not, Hutman said.

“This is the first Thanksgiving I haven’t had her at our house,” Hutman said of her mother, who has a form of Alzheimer’s that tends to check normal inhibitions and make her feisty. “She loves to come home and see the family, but before she realizes it she is overtired and irritable.”

Hutman has hired Jackie Iglesias, 30, to be a companion for her mother a few hours a day, to take her shopping and for walks. “I like this job because it gives me a chance to know the elderly,” said Iglesias, whose own mother is one of the facility’s overnight aides. “Young people don’t realize that old people need love and attention, they’re very sweet, very beautiful. Sometimes they get confused, but I’m there to tell them that nothing is going to happen to them.

“Maybe in the future I can open a home like this,” she said.

“Look at this, all fixed up,” Ruth, 87, said in her German-accented English as she spied the apple and pumpkin pies on the stove top before dinner. Jaurgeui, the aide, was at her elbow, and the Mexico native explained to the old woman who fled the Holocaust that in a little while she was going to have a “beautiful Thanksgiving lunch.”

“Ohhh,” Ruth sighed.

* AIDING THE NEEDY

Volunteers across the Southland feed the elderly, homeless and needy people. A3

* OUT-OF-CONTROL PARADE

Gusty winds jostled balloons, injured four in annual Macy’s parade. A41