A hint of Fall. . .

I took my camera with me to the Chippewa Flowage but didn't bring the battery charger. This picture documents the edge of our good friend Paul's dock, and perhaps the first hint of autumn.

This has been a week full of highs and lows. On Wednesday I toured three nursing homes on behalf of my mother, who now experiences life second by second and seems to understand it less and less. She must move from her comfortable memory care unit into the final leg of her journey, and a higher level of care.

I remember taking Mom to visit my Aunt Joan, who accomplished her dementia by virtue of the consumption of vodka martinis, at Chatham Oaks, which used to be called the County Home. Mom was in the early stages of her disease and found the visit very sad and difficult. A woman was wandering the halls wringing her hands and pleading "help me, please! Help me!" Mom couldn't abide seeing her like that and pulled a staff person aside and asked her to do something. There was, of course, nothing to do.

The places I visited were only marginally less sad than the County Home. All three seemed well run and the people I met who lived there seemed comfortable. Staff treated them considerately and seemed quite used to this end of other people's lives. In the end I chose a place that was a little quieter, that had a nice room to offer and a quiet room-mate who is "in about the same stage as your mother," the intake director explained.



I have always planned that as Mom's money ran out and her cognition disappeared I would move away from the comparative luxury of the assisted living facilities she nonetheless hated and settle on practical care. There is no reduction in price for this lack of luxury since she requires more staffing and hourly care. There is no fine art and there are no chandeliers in the lobby. We purchase cleanliness, good care, and the absence of the smell of urine, sweat, and the subtle funk of old age left unattended. Mom sleeps wherever she is seated and looks apologetically and confusedly at whoever speaks to her, searching for an answer that comes to her less and less, the end of a sentence begun seemingly eons ago, the identity of a face so familiar and yet infinitely puzzling. I found myself wanting her to have a private room, a little place of her own. What good would that do? She's more likely to be attended to if there's someone else there, if she's out in the common area. The privacy is for me, for who she used to be, for old times.

We're now in a race between Mom's assets and her neurology. Her attorney and I are moving to take advantage of something called a "Miller Trust." This trust is designed for people like my mother with steady income that doesn't cover the cost of nursing care. We put her income and dwindling assets into a trust and make a pact with Medicaid. I think we can protect her life insurance benefits, but I'm not sure. She's "spending down." In the end, I guess we all do, one way or another.

I have been involved as a witness in a trial of a young former youth worker at my former employer who took it upon herself to seduce my 16 year old client who was a resident in her care at the time. This young man initially felt that the incidents in question were his responsibility. I don't know if being a young man, and being offended against by a woman, made his situation worse. All victims start out feeling for their oppression, at least all the victims I've worked with.

This young man was a child witness to horrifying domestic abuse, over and over again. He learned some things about intimate relationships it will take much of his life to unlearn. Our work together centers on how to trust, how to be trustworthy, how to love and be loved. The young woman's need to "fall in love" with her client, to tell him the bad things staff were saying about him during their meetings, to involve him in an attempted cover up of her madness and irresponsibility "proved" to him again that intimacy is inevitably for satisfying the needs of others at one's own expense. It erased the value of his treatment, leaving him as doubtful as he was when he began it.

My client's mother called administrators at the agency. She called the Department of Human Services. She called the Sheriff. They told her that what happened was not a crime, was not child abuse, that the young man was at the age of consent and that there was, regrettably, nothing to be done. She looked up the Iowa Code for herself and found a statute making it illegal for counselors to engage in sexual activity with clients. She copied this statute and sent it to the agency, to DHS, to the Sheriff's office and the County Attorney.

My client was called upon to testify several times. As we worked together and as he gained some distance, he came to see that he needed to face his accuser and tell what happened. To my wonder and amazement he gave a powerful deposition, and appeared as a witness in court, at great emotional cost. The jury found the young woman guilty of "sexual assault by a counselor." She may serve up to a year in jail, may be listed on the sex offender registry, may be on a ten year "special probation." The judge will have some discretion. He also knows that she lied, failed a lie detector test, made a full confession on videotape, and that the videotape evidence was thrown out because she asked to stop and her interrogators insisted she continue.

I know that this mother saw an opportunity, at long last, to defend her son and pursued it. I know that this young man summoned all his courage and faced his abuser and the legal system he has come to hate and fear and gave truthful testimony. I know that now he his making his way from the place of victimization to the place of surviving. I have seen too many young people stumble on this path not to appreciate how miraculous and wonderful this is.

In the paper, and on line, people are speculating about the harshness of the young woman's sentence. The paper reported, falsely, that the young man "initiated" the inappropriate activity. He did not. He initiated the "meeting," wanting to talk about going home. Some on line commentators saw the situation as the enactment of "every boy's adolescent fantasy." Some commented that the young woman wasn't really that attractive. My client and his mother read this stuff. I ask them not to.

At the Jackson Street El stop in Chicago, I saw a busker. We were rushing to a ball game and the people in the crowd were all in a hurry to go some place or another. She was a woman, but it was hard to distinguish her gender. She was neatly dressed and had a violin attached somehow to her neck, a guitar on a strap, some sort of percussion shaker at the end of the guitar's neck, and tap shoes on her feet. The music she made was entirely her own. She bowed the fiddle, strummed the guitar, plucked the fiddle, bowed the guitar, her feet tapping the concrete like castanets. She made an unearthly sound, not jazz, not folk, more performance than interpretation. I went back hurriedly to take her picture.

There in the afternoon bustle in a public place, the busker was making music in her own style, in her own way, and seemed oblivious to the crowd around her. She could have been singing old favorites for the crowd, chasing them with songs they might like, but she wasn't. She stood proudly, making her own strange noise to the counterpoint of crowd and trains.

At the game we met up with an AmeriCorps Member recently graduated from our program. He is from the South Side of Chicago, a Sox fan, and had never been to a game. For 25 dollars we bought him a ticket and we all enjoyed a perfect late summer evening.