Opening minds
Opening Minds Through Art pairs seniors with dementia and high school students in rewarding time for both
Arts program pairs seniors with dementia with high school students
KITCHENER — Irene Hertzberger, a century and seven days old, pinched a fat orange crayon between the thumb and index finder on her right hand.
Her eyes blazed with intensity, behind her copper-tinged spectacles.
Irene coloured her artwork, a dreamy tangerine vase swaddled in sparkling blue, with the same fierceness she once used to knit spectacular afghans and reel in 20pound northern pike from the fish-filled waters around her Manitoulin Island cottage.
“You’re good at this,” said Sophia Pettit, studying the emerging image.
Irene, who has five great-grandchildren and four great-great grandchildren, smiled and motioned for Sophia, a 15-year-old Forest Heights Collegiate high school student volunteering her time, to take over the colouring for a moment.
“Oh, I like these colours,” Irene often tells her.
It’s Thursday afternoon in The Gathering Place at Trinity Village Care Centre in Kitchener.
The retirement home for about 150, owned by the not-for-profit Lutheran Homes Kitchener-Waterloo, is tucked in behind a big mall and beside a wide highway.
Irene and Sophia, artist and right-hand helper, are a dynamic drawing duo for an hour and then some on this day.
So are 17 other teens, and 17 other seniors who are touched by dementia.
They are paired-up partners in Opening Minds Through Art, a program imported from an Ohio university by Trinity’s lead facilitator, Kathryn Bender.
“You are an artist,” Bender told Irene, admiring the brilliant orange and vibrant blue contrasts in her just-finished work.
This is Week 4 of an eight-week program running each high school semester for the past four years. Students from Forest Heights, Eastwood Collegiate and Père René de Galinée can earn volunteer hours. Each week, there is a different art project. Come May, there will be an art show.
But beyond the art, the program is about making a connection.
“I really love getting to know Irene,” Sophia said. “She’s really sweet.”
Some days, Irene’s dementia fuels anxiety. Other days, she’s calm and bright, like her pastel pink earrings and painted finger nails.
But Irene — who has lived her entire 100 years in Kitchener raising a daughter Patricia and son Richard with her late husband of 69 years Russell — is in command when it comes to her Thursday art.
So many choices in her life are made for her now. But not when she and Sophia sit together.
Irene picks the colours. She asks for the glittering sparkles and brushes the background, even as the tubes from the oxygen tank on the back of her wheelchair occasionally slip from her nose.
Irene — an Ides of March baby born 10 days after her old Shanley Street neighbour Kitchener hockey legend Milt Schmidt — chooses the project theme.
Be it dog, cat or funky vase, she takes her best artistic stab at it.
She taps her right foot to the tune of “This Little Light of Mine,” while singing along with the other artists and their teenage sidekicks.
Sophia, whose great grandma Pamela also lives at Trinity Village and is part of the art program, holds the yellow lyric sheet for Irene to read.
But Irene, whose favourite tune is “Goodnight, Irene,” doesn’t need a teenage teleprompter when she croons.
“She always knows the words. She doesn’t have to look at the lyrics,” Sophia said. “She loves to sing.”
Irene has changed a little over their four weeks together, Sophia figures.
“She’s a bit more confident,” Sophia said. “She’s happy.”