{"id":24339,"date":"2017-05-19T03:39:40","date_gmt":"2017-05-19T10:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=24339"},"modified":"2017-05-17T15:02:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-17T22:02:00","slug":"books-for-people-with-dementia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2017\/05\/19\/books-for-people-with-dementia\/","title":{"rendered":"Books for people with dementia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eliezer Sobel created L\u2019Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life<\/em> with his parents in mind. (photo from Shutterstock)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Eliezer Sobel\u2019s new book, L\u2019Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life<\/em>, was born from personal experience.<\/p>\n

Sobel is an artist at heart and has spent his life finding ways to interact with people \u2013 through writing, facilitating workshops and running retreats over the past three decades. Three years ago, on his parents\u2019 67th anniversary, things took a turn for the worse.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother is in her 17th year of Alzheimer\u2019s and is 93,\u201d Sobel told the Independent<\/em>. \u201cMy dad was fine and taking care of her at home until he was 90. On their 67th wedding anniversary, he fell down the stairs. He fell on his head and almost died. Overnight, there were two dementia patients in the house.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrior to that, he was driving, cooking and shopping, as well as hiring and handling the payroll for a team of seven aides. He was amazing with it. Suddenly, overnight, I had a brain-damaged dad at 90 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sobel and his wife lived in Virginia at the time, which is seven to eight hours away from New Jersey, where his parents lived. After the accident, however, they moved into his parents\u2019 home.<\/p>\n

\"photo
Writer Eliezer Sobel\u2019s parents, Manya and Max, in 2016. They were the inspiration for Sobel\u2019s series of picture books for readers with dementia. (photo by Eliezer Sobel)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe stayed in the house for 10 months, taking care of my parents and trying to get the right kind of help in the house that would enable us to eventually move out,\u201d explained Sobel. \u201cBut we stayed nearby so we could monitor and manage the scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

His dad recovered a substantial amount of his cognitive and physical ability, but passed away this past November.<\/p>\n

The work on the book goes back to 2011. \u201cShe didn\u2019t speak English words anymore,\u201d said Sobel of his mother at the time. \u201cShe would sometimes make up her own language and sounds. She stopped reading, as far as we knew.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne day, I came upon her accidentally…. She was flipping through a magazine and I overheard her reading the big print headlines out loud, in English, correctly. I was totally floored. Mom can still read, even if it\u2019s just a three-word phrase.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sobel wanted to run out and buy his mom a picture book, one designed for Alzheimer\u2019s and dementia sufferers, but he couldn\u2019t find one anywhere. His next thought was to use a children\u2019s picture book, but he was unsure whether his mother could negotiate a book with a storyline. He wanted each page to stand on its own, so it would not require the reader to recall what had happened on a previous page.<\/p>\n

\u201cI called up the national Alzheimer\u2019s association and spoke with their chief librarian for the whole U.S. and her response to me was to say that there were 20,000 books for caregivers of those with memory loss,\u201d said Sobel. \u201cI said, \u2018I am not looking for [a book for] the caregiver, I\u2019m looking for my mother, the patient. There was dead silence on the other end of the line. She couldn\u2019t think of any such book. Eventually, she did mention one other author who has since become an acquaintance of mine who had a few books, but they weren\u2019t really what I wanted, so I realized I had to do this myself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI first did a book that wasn\u2019t just for Jews. It was for anyone with memory loss. It was called Blue Sky, White Clouds<\/em>, and came out in 2012.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sobel \u2013 who has also written a novel and a memoir \u2013 received such a positive response to this first picture book that he decided to make it into a series.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother got to enjoy the first book a lot,\u201d said Sobel. \u201cHer aides would use it with her almost daily. We would observe that she would zero in on particular photos, ignore certain pages, find a photo \u2013 particularly one of a married elderly couple \u2013 and contemplate it for 20 minutes and caress the faces.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese books are for a particular stage of dementia,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re appropriate for someone who\u2019s got enough memory loss and dementia that they won\u2019t be offended or have awareness that this is kind of a simplistic picture book, they\u2019ll just be interested. But they can\u2019t be too far gone, like my mother now, who can\u2019t even look at my face, let alone my book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Caregivers often struggle with how to engage people with Alzheimer\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\"photo
A page from L\u2019Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life. (photo by Olaf Herfurth)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very hard to find activities to do with someone in that condition,\u201d said Sobel. \u201cSo, what I was trying to accomplish was to give caregivers something they could share with the patient … or give patients something they could use on their own…. It was an opportunity for sharing to occur, an activity of quality time. For certain pages, in the earlier stages [of dementia], it stimulates memories, conversations, reminiscences or free association.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m from the creative right brain of things, so I could find things to do with my mother, like empty a box of coins on the table and we\u2019d spend an hour playing with them \u2013 pennies over here, stacking the quarters, making a picture of a house with the dimes. Then, I\u2019d say to my dad, \u2018See, Dad! There are lots of things you can do with Mom. You could put these coins away and do the same thing tomorrow. She won\u2019t remember.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cHe would call me the next day, and say, \u2018Ah, it didn\u2019t work. She didn\u2019t know the difference between a penny and a nickel.\u2019 That was the point. He\u2019s a mathematician and very linear … [he] could not break into the play mode. If you\u2019re someone who\u2019s good with little kids, you can do that with someone like my mom.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some ways, Sobel often finds himself feeling grateful to Alzheimer\u2019s, because it made it possible for him and his mother to grow closer \u2013 at least for the first 10 years of her disease.<\/p>\n

At the beginning, Sobel saw her become more available. As a Holocaust refugee, she had always been very insulated, private and afraid of others. Sobel said he went to a psychic early on in her disease, worried that his mother was losing her memories, and the psychic thought she\u2019d be happier without them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was true,\u201d Sobel reflected. \u201cShe transformed from that scared refugee into an open, childlike, loving, laughing angel. People would feel blessed to be around her. She was delightful \u2013 greeting strangers and striking up conversations that made no sense. She and I laughed about who knows what. She and my father would dance to music. A lot of things were happy about her Alzheimer\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not saying there weren\u2019t nightmarish times. We had our share of those as well,\u201d he added. \u201cShe went through a violent period where she was chasing people with steak knives. We had to put her into a psych ward for 10 days.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was the exception, though, and Sobel said, \u201cI had an opportunity to finally heal my relationship with her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rebeca Kuropatwa<\/strong> is a Winnipeg freelance writer.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eliezer Sobel created L\u2019Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life with his parents in mind. (photo from Shutterstock) Eliezer Sobel\u2019s new book, L\u2019Chaim: Pictures to Evoke Memories of Jewish Life, was born from personal experience. Sobel is an artist at heart and has spent his life finding ways to interact with people \u2013 through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[2667,2668,7085,3225,53,218],"class_list":["post-24339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-alzheimers","tag-dementia","tag-eliezer-sobel","tag-health-care","tag-holocaust","tag-judaism"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}