Lisa Anderson

Lisa Anderson piques all our consciences. She reminds us about the difference we can make in someone’s life. She nudges us to remember and visit our aging elders who often feel alone, isolated and sometimes abandoned. She encourages us put aside our reticence; she pokes us instead, to visit Waldoboro Green and other homes where elders no longer live surrounded by everything they have known. Lisa realizes life is messy. She knows that time is precious for all of us. And still, she asks us to do this. After all, we have good angels living inside of us. And these are our elders.

I grew up in the bad section of South Philadelphia, and my mom, well, she did the best she could with a sixth-grade education.  We were eleven kids, and she put us all through Catholic school.  My father was a hard worker, kept a job — he probably had two jobs — and gave Mom plenty of money to take care of his kids.

I was nine when I lost my poppa.  Then I lost both of my grandmothers.  And then I lost my brother, the one I was probably closest to, when I was fifteen in my freshman year of high school.  Someone robbed him, shot him, and left him for dead in a stairwell.

I wasn’t a bad kid.  I was always helping out the old folks in our neighborhood, scrubbing their front steps, going to the store for them, cleaning the front of their house.  I would tell them, “I hope I get to be as old as you.”  For me, it’s the joy.  But after my brother was killed, I was off the chain.  It took me like twenty years if not more to deal with the sadness of his death.

However I did use to go and visit what we used to call the Old Folks Home.  It was right around the corner from me.  I knew a lot of people there – friends of my mother, people that knew my grandmother, and the mothers and aunts of my brother’s friends.  And I had known them from when I was growing up.  I loved them.  I would go and clean for them, make a coffee run, buy them something they couldn’t get at the Home.

But when my mom died in 2018, I was like, “What’s left?”

Because you only get one Mom.  She’s the one you can always run back to.

But when you aint got that no more?  You better use those wings she gave you, and you better fly.  And you better stand on your own two feet.  You going to always need help.  But you better be able to take care of yourself, because you can’t rely on people to take care of yourself your whole life.

And if you get a good friend, hold on to them, because they’re hard to come by.  I met Paul sometime in there, met him one night after I was coming out of a bar, and I asked him for a cigarette and for him to wish me happy birthday.  We talked a lot.  We would see each other.  And we became friends.  Sometimes he’d take me out to the beach.  Or to dinner.  I always felt I could tell him everything that was going on my life, even the bad parts.  Then Paul moved back to Massachusetts, but we still stayed in touch.

One day he called to tell me he was moving here, to Waldoboro, from Massachusetts.  He said, “If you want to come out, I’ll come get you.”  He drove 10 hours and picked me up and brought me back.

When I came here, I felt I was starting my life.  I had decided I would care for people, but first I had to get any job.  In two weeks, I was working at Hannaford’s.  It was like my mom always said: “Work for a living.  Make a way for you.  Be supportive of yourself.”

I worked there for two years, and then I went to Waldoboro Green caring for older people.  I was there almost another two years.

I don’t work there any longer, but I still visit.  Older folk – they remember back to their childhood all the way until they became an adult.  Their stories are better than a book.  And their stories can always help you.

There’s a sweetheart of a woman I like to see.  She has dementia.  Recently she recited a poem to me.  She’d learned it when she was ten years old.  And that poem was long!  It was about a baby and a house.  She might forget something, but the big things come back to her.

There’s another person there whose hands aren’t strong enough to wring out a washcloth.  So, every two weeks I go and get her new ones.  And when I give them to her, she’s like a little kid.

I think giving and sharing is a secret power of mine.  The love I feel, and give, is genuine from the heart.  I can see that on their faces when I am around them.  They light up.  And all I want to do is make somebody smile

I’m studying now for my certification because I want to work in people’s homes instead of a facility.  It’s true – they might be safer there than at home.  But there, they have lost control of their life.  They’re in a place where somebody else is dictating their life.

And the older people that I’ve seen, when you take them out of their elements, especially when they can still move about, they start getting confused.  They’re no longer surrounded by all their things, like at home.  And so, they feel isolated.  Their old home might not have been perfect but at least they had all their memories around them.  But I also know life isn’t perfect.

I just try to do all the things that would bring them a smile and make their day.  And I do okay.

In Waldoboro, all the people I’ve met, from when I got here until now, and in all the places where I’ve worked or been, from Dunkin to the gas stations, to Homestead at Cushing to Hannaford and Waldoboro Green – I’ve never had any problems.  And people like me!

So, I want to give back to the community.  I want to help.  And any time that I can help someone do something, get somewhere, I just want to be available.

Older folk give me so much hope.  But they really, really need our help.