AURORA — The old man’s eyes brightened beneath the bill of his baseball cap as he pulled out a weathered wallet and explored the folds and creases until, beneath a leather flap, he found what he was looking for — the black-and-white photograph of a boyish young man grinning for the camera and surrounded by nuns in black habits.
“That’s me,” said Paul Schoolcraft. “I was 19 years old.”
He knows that the picture was taken at a convent in Japan, after World War II had ended, when he was still in the Army. Although he has carried it for years and it clearly remains a touchstone of his life, its significance now escapes a deteriorating memory.
Kyle Rusk, a 23-year-old student at Community College of Aurora, saw the photo’s effect and gently probed further, hoping to flesh out this chapter of Schoolcraft’s life.
“He didn’t remember exactly where he was, or why he was there,” Rusk said. “I think he was part of the occupation force in Japan after the war. He really liked it there, from what he told me.”
Rusk and 19 other students in instructor Rachel Blue Ankney’s composition class have been handed a challenging assignment that asks them to reach beyond the basic essay. In two separate sessions one week apart, they interviewed residents of a Denver facility that cares for people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia — and then attempted to capture that person in a three- or four-page profile.
Ankney will grade their efforts like other pieces of writing, but the students seem even more invested in another audience: their subjects’ families, who will receive copies of the essays as one means to preserve fading memories.
“This is much different,” Rusk said, comparing previous writing assignments to this profile-in-progress. “This is going to go to his children. It’s a lot more intimate of a paper than I’ve ever done before.”
It took weeks to organize the logistics of transporting 19 residents from the Emeritus at Denver, an assisted living memory care unit, to the CCA campus. The project had to get clearance from residents and their families as well as from CCA facilities, security operations and administration.
The residents, most in the early stages of memory loss, were eager to participate. And while the students in Ankney’s class, many in their first semester at the school, may be relatively inexperienced writers, she likes presenting them with this challenge at a time when they’re so full of potential.
Last year, Ankney had her class do profiles of fallen soldiers — an exercise in research through family and friends. But the Alzheimer’s assignment pushed them further outside their comfort zone to interact with their subjects, one-to-one, with the added behavioral variable of dementia.
“You could see it in their eyes — there was a lot of concern,” Ankney said. “They’re not confident yet that they can do justice to the residents.”
Prior to the first meeting, she handed out an information sheet to each student containing bullet points touching on key elements of their resident’s life. The resident care director at Emeritus spoke to the class in advance to prepare them to deal with their subject’s dementia and the possibility they might become emotional or send the conversation wandering on tangents. She offered tips on what kinds of things to ask and what to avoid.
And if a resident regressed to an earlier time in their life, students were encouraged to “join the journey.”
“I asked if anyone was scared,” said Ankney, “and everyone raised their hand.”
Wispy gray hair
On Tuesday, the residents arrived at CCA for their second meeting with the students carrying purple gift bags containing a notebook, some snacks and a short note expressing their appreciation to their student profiler.
A resident with wispy gray hair pulled out his harmonica and played while students and residents got reacquainted. Some residents remembered the previous week’s session.
For others, the process started anew.
Kevin Shea, a 25-year-old student dressed in a crisp blue shirt and tie, reintroduced himself to Lara Evelyn Inez and retraced their earlier conversation.
He had prepared questions based on her background, focusing on her childhood near the town of Antonito and leading to her migration to Denver to attend college.
“After that, it was kind of where she led the conversation, where she allowed me to go,” Shea said.
If her diminished memory made it difficult to draw out details, it also served to focus on important themes, such as her father’s compassion and generosity as a grocery store owner. These were qualities Lara sought to reflect in her own life.
But when the conversation shifted to her move to Denver and attending school, time stood still. Shea joined the journey.
“I got all her fears and emotions as if she was still in school,” he said. “She was afraid she couldn’t afford it, or pass classes. It was like a freeze frame of everything she felt at that time.”
After the first session, he thought it would be difficult to write even a page. But with time, he recognized the recurring explanations of her father’s kindness as a key passage in her life and realized he had just scratched the surface.
“I want to portray her feelings to her family, and how that’s echoed through the years,” Shea said. “Those are her most vibrant memories, so I definitely want her family to know they’re still with her, no matter what.”
Akhari Davis, 20, found herself paired with Charles “Doc” Dafoe, who told her about delivering roughly 4,000 babies during his 40-year career as an ob/gyn. Doc made her feel instantly comfortable during the interviews, despite the fact that a last-minute change of pairings gave her no chance to prepare questions.
“My biggest concern is actually writing it,” Davis said. “It’s very nerve-wracking, because I want to get it all right, so when family members do read it, they can see their father or grandpa or uncle in it. So they can see none of me, all of him.”
Even in a relatively brief window of contact — less than four hours over two sessions — and despite the challenges of the residents’ dementia, connections emerged.
Schoolcraft, with the World War II-era photo in his wallet, may not have recalled its backstory, but even after a week he remembered his essayist, Kyle Rusk.
And Rusk won’t soon forget his subject.
“As soon as I started talking to Paul,” he said, “I felt good about being able to write this paper. He made me laugh right away.”
At every pause in the conversation, Schoolcraft urged Rusk to go to medical school and become a doctor. He also took an interest in his personal life.
“He points to one of my classmates, a girl, and says, ‘Do you know her?’ I told him I sit next to her in class,” Rusk recounted from their first meeting.
Schoolcraft immediately advised him to ask her out. Moments later, when he rose and started walking away, Rusk asked him where he was going.
“He says, ‘To introduce myself to her. You come over in couple of moments and I’ll introduce you,’ ” he said. “I knew right then: He was trying to hook me up.”
When they reconnected Tuesday, Rusk was uncertain if his subject would remember him.
“Hey, Paul, how are you doing?” he asked.
“You recognize me!” Paul replied. “Have you asked that girl out yet?”
Coaxing anecdotes
Nearby, Mat Romero coaxed anecdotes from Dan Dillon, who worked for years as a sound engineer in movies and television, including the “Bewitched” series. He rubbed shoulders with stars such as Gary Cooper and Shirley Temple, and fondly recalled Barbra Streisand dubbing him “Dan the Sound Man.”
The more Romero and Dillon talked, the more they connected. For the 18-year-old, the exercise became more and more familiar, underscoring similarities to his grandfather’s early onset of dementia.
“The more I talked to Dan,” he said, “the more it was like talking to my grandpa.”
When the session ended, Romero cradled Dillon’s arm to steady him as the residents made their way back toward the bus that would take them home.
A few minutes later, Ankney pulled the students together for some final advice. She would provide them with phone numbers of the residents’ family members, if available, so students could fact-check their stories and fill in some blanks.
The hard work of writing would follow.
“It’s not about the disease,” Ankney reminded them. “It’s not about memory loss. It’s about who they are as people.”
Although they are writing for a grade, writing to help leave a legacy, the students ultimately are writing for themselves, Ankney figured. Even in an age of digital communication when young adults write more than ever, she hoped they would absorb an “implied lesson” about the strength and power of communication.
“They write more than they talk,” she said, “but I don’t think that connection is being made yet how important their writing can be if they choose to make it so. (Alzheimer’s) is a very progressive disease. It’s an opportunity to capture these stories before they can’t be captured anymore.”
Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739, ksimpson@denverpost.com or
