Last Day at Westlake/Merrill Gardens

Today as I taught my last class at the old folks’ home, I was struck by how deep the friendships had grown among us, without our even having noticed. 

Our elders, some areyoung enough to be my grandmother, others are old enough to be my father, unlike the one I never had. But in this room, age has dissolved, and we are all one age between us. 

Li says we are all like family sitting around this table. I know so much about each of you. We have traveled beyond the shore where student and teacher are forever divided. This is not casual garden-variety friendship. We have deepened with each other.

Sometimes I feel strange teaching my elders, but the young students I teach must think a vast gulf divides us as well, yet, we too are one. Friendship with 10-year-olds or with 90-year-olds is one thing. Unintentionally or proximity, it doesn’t matter in the end.

3/24/2007

Addendum, I took dictation and tried to keep true to participants speech and sentence structure, correcting very little, other than punctuation. I gave them a printed copy and they made further changes on their own, which I recorded.

I posted the stories and poems I could find on my hard drive, but I waited far too long to make this blog, and now many of the files are corrupt. One is just lines. As in lines. Literally. I think I got all of Madeline Bedal's stories, though one file was horribly corrupted. I posted the memoirs under client's names, rather than by the date written. You can tell from some of them that though the bulk of the work was published in April of 2005, it really spanned six months or more: including Christmas and New Years. The residency spanned from 2004 (when?) to March 24, 2007. I met with the elders once a week.

Westlake was sold. The man who hired me, Alex Chan left. The new company, Merrill Gardens began to forget to issue my paychecks, as they didn't want to pay me $75 a session. They tried to talk me down to $25 a session. But they sure charged the elders plenty per month. They didn't see the value in enrichment. Since I took dictation, and typed everything up, I was already giving Merrill Gardens loads of donated time as it was. Not to mention the long commute! It was a lot of work. So we parted company.   —Maureen Hurley 10/11/23

Della Madeline Stannard Bedal obituary

Madeline Bedal was a student of mine at Merrill Gardens assisted living. We created a manuscript of her work where she dictated stories of her childhood to me. And October 2005, her brother Bill Stannard created a chapbook of her work. I had no idea her first name was Della—no wonder I could never find the obituary. (added 8/2023.) See also:  Madeline Stannard Bedal Chapbook

DELLA MADELINE BEDAL A funeral service for Della Madeline Bedal, 92, of Fremont will be at Chapel of the Roses in Fremont. Viewing Friday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and services at 1 p.m. Pastor Tom Cory will officiate. She passed peacefully on November 29, 2006 in Fremont. She was born May 14, 1914 in Whitefish, Montana and had been a kindergarten teacher before she married and moved to San Jose. She was a devoted wife of 62 years, loving mother and grandmother and an inspiration to all who knew her. She loved to cook, sew and be around her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She is survived by her daughter, Edna Rodriggs of Fremont and daughter and son-in-law, Gloria and John Coyne of Lakeport. Brother and sister-in-law, William Albert and Donna Stannard of Fremont; sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Kay and Ken Hayes of Castro Valley; sister-in-law, Lila Smith of Sacramento and sister-in-law, Betty Bedal of Sacramento; 11 grandchildren, 23 great-grandchildren and 1 great-great-grandchild. Published by ANG Newspapers on Dec. 1, 2006. Legacy.com

In the rain, dancing without an umbrella (Westlake/Merrill Gardens journal)

Singing, dancing in the rain, the world is transformed, even the gutters lose distinction with the sidewalks and curbstones. The rain pounds the pavement with such vigor that the streets are transformed into vast, gray trampolines, and the Magritte’s Golconda jumpers are falling from the clouds. Not to mention the cats and dogs. The rain bounces up and blurs that distinction between street and curb, ocean and sky. 

Today, in my Elder writing group at Merrill Gardens, one old woman from the northern provinces, tried to reconstruct images of home. She wanted to become a phoenix and rise up from her own ashes in another country. She studied hard to be a doctor. Tomorrow I’ll be 88, she said. I have not thought about China for many years. She is beginning to remember after forgetting the atrocities of the past for so many years.

She said, Once it was raining in her village, the Japanese had invaded, so she walked to school in the rain without an umbrella. She needed to be the strong one, she didn’t let go of her young cousin’s hand, not even when the rain beat down with such force, that their legs turned yellow from the mud. She tells me that the Yangtze means yellow river.

Rivulets made their way to the ocean, to the China Sea, and the school became a raft across the sea to Africa, to the Sahara, and then to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, the place of flowers, where she made her escape and met her husband in transit, waiting there for years as he perfected his surgery on the open heart. 

The breakthrough operation was the first of its kind in a country of parched thirst, under siege, in a drought. She wears an umbrella for the sun. She is waiting for her people to go to Cold Mountain, where she watched her first movie of a man with an umbrella, singing and dancing in the rain, and his heart was full. He was dancing with an open heart. The rain rose up, like a flock of phoenixes, seeking the eye of the sun.

11/12/2004 Writers’ Group