Someone Like You:
Meet a Recipient
of the 2007 "Caregiver of the Year" Award:

Patty M. Kearns, Teaneck, N.J.

Nominated by: Nancy Lewin of Johnson & Johnson Caregiver Initiative; read nominating letter

Care Recipient: Patty’s mom Helen, who is 90, suffers from Alzheimer's disease and cancer. As of January 2008, she now resides in a long-term care facility.

In Patty's words:

When I feel stressed, I: remember to love. I remind myself that I’m supposed to be a loving presence. My intention is to be the most loving soul I can be. That’s relaxing. Always know you do the right thing when you come from a place of love.

When things get crazy, we start to raise our voices. We’re only human, but we are also divine. Try this little technique: Soften your tone, it will soften you. Soften Your Tone. It’s such an easy method for dissolving everyone’s stress. We don’t have to perfect, only loving.

My hardest part is: The many levels of sadness and exhaustion, the thousand deaths and losses when a loved one is so ill for so long. I worked day and night to keep my mom’s quality of life at home only to part now, with her placement into long-term care. Toughest of all is that we do this ongoing caregiving to life’s end: then ultimately our beloved must leave.

When I have an extra five minutes, I: Practice relaxation. I’ve believed in this so strongly that I created and produced an entire CD stress reduction program, Removing Negative Thoughts to help battle the darkness of depression. What’s exciting is that you can learn to relax deeply even in a five-minute time span. Best, it’s something we can do for ourselves that's as healthy as a good night's sleep. When you think that when Going Deeper isn’t good enough…Go Deeper. Seek a better thought.

My mantra is: Probably that when life brings you to your knees, pray. I'm always in touch, in prayer. When we pray for one another, we're connected to each other and to the Divine.

The legacy I would leave to another family caregiver is: My book, Lessons in the Divine for Caregivers. I poured myself into my book so that caregivers could laugh, cry, learn. It’s zany, it’s fun, it’s sad yet hopeful. It comes to us as Life’s chapters do….in pages. I gave them my book so they could open to any page and discover new beginnings.

My 2008 goal is: To accomplish my dream of finishing my book (In Tumble’s World, a childrens’ book for all ages,) a love story about the loss of a local wilderness and the return to Innocence. We must take care of one another and our earth.

I’m most proud: I feel so blessed and thankful for the gift of having my angel Mom for as long as I've had her. With the silence of her absence from the house, every day I notice new beauties about her patience (with me—ha-ha!), her exquisite artistic talents, her wellsprings of forgiveness, her graciousness, her life of prayer and the humility of her ways. Never have I met anyone so pure.

When Patty and I spoke over the holidays, she was reeling from her mom's recent hospitalization. “I cry every night, the house is so silent,” she said. “I can't walk into her bedroom and kiss her hand. I understand the need to keep focusing on life, but I mourn my mom's presence.”

Patty's mom (Helen) first needed Patty's intensive care 10 years ago; the needs grew until six years ago when Patty could no longer work a full-time job. “I couldn’t work a corporate job, so I took from my retirement (fund),” she explained. “Yes, I would tell people that’s hard. But I wouldn’t have done it any differently because it gave me that extra time with my Mom.”

During that time, Patty not only provided loving care for mom, but wrote and published a book, Lessons in the Divine for Caregivers. According to its description on Amazon.com, Lessons “illuminates the unexpected, soothes the unaware, bares a lock-tight case for empathy building, offers practical advice for the bedraggled, calms with compassion, and sheds light and healing laughter on the more difficult concerns to pin down--the ones disturbing your soul.”

“Blessings (like the book) happen along the way. It wrote each paragrah down as it was given to me," she explained. “(Caregiving) is my noble purpose. I couldn’t have done any less, and God has been so good to me."

Patty hoped to have her mom return home after the hospitalization, but suddenly she needed full-time, long-term care. "Nevertheless, keep your heart open because there is always yet another lesson, always a new gift: Mom now has 35 persons on her care team helping her the way I did. They’re wonderful,” Patty said.

With the worsening of Helen's health, a move to a nursing home has signaled a new role for Patty’s caregiving. “I'm helping her prepare for the eternal life of her soul.”

She adds: “We're getting (our care recipients) ready for Heaven, for the continuum. The idea is to “continue 'em…tell good stories about them. That's one way we can provide end-of-life care. We can give them moments of joy, hugs and kisses. We can fill them with reminders of the beauty their lives have brought. We can tell them that we remember, that we’ll always love and remember.

“Continue them so their stories live on into the continuum. Keep telling good stories about them.”

Patty and Helen share a caregiving run that includes a major recovery in 2000 from a crippling setback of osteo-arthritis that left Helen unable to walk. “After months and months of rehabilitation, we returned to regular trips out for dinner to break the cabin fever. We discovered new daily routines that included a social life for Helen at an adult medical day center. There hasn’t been a time when she hasn’t gone out with her earrings and lipstick on,” Patty said. “They called Helen the ‘Dutchess of DayAway.’”

Today Patty cares for her 10-month-old grandson, Lucas, while Patty's daughter Jillian works as a teacher. Patty also takes time to reflect on her lessons learned from Helen. “She has taught me how to live perfectly in the present. Alzheimer’s is a gift for teaching us how to do that. The more I've seen of life, the bigger God gets.”

Patty, at 62 years young, feels like she's just beginning to take the next big steps in her life, believing that we all receive many callings during our lifetime. She answered the call to caregive. Who knows what the next great call will be for her.--Denise M. Brown

Meet Our Winners:

• Leon Beer, nominated Sharon Lebenkoff of Leeza's Place at Park Slope Geriatric Day Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
• MoZetta Zion, nominated by her self
• Patty Kearns, nominated by Nancy Lewin of Johnson & Johnson Caregiver Initiative
• Norma Bell, nominated by Sharon Pease, Norma's daughter
• Kimi Morton Chun, nominated by Sheila Warnock of ShareTheCaregiving, Inc.
• Aracelis Fernandez, nominated by Diana King of PSS Caregivers Support Program, Bronx, N.Y.

And, meet winners from previous years:

(Unforeseen difficulties caused us to put the contest on hold in 2005 and 2006.)

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