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Saturdays with Sadie

They are fast friends, if only for a while. Weekly visits brighten the twilight for one, light the path away from grief for the other.

By KIM CROSS
Published July 26, 2004

[Times photos: Kinfay Moroti]

Jeannine Thompson, a hospice volunteer, visits 101-year-old Sadie Sharpe nearly every Saturday at her nursing home in Tampa. Her most important job? To listen.

	“These moments with Sadie don’t always make up for all the other bad things in the world,” Jeannine Thompson says. “But they’re something.”

TAMPA - She has lost count of the Saturdays she has spent at the bedside of the tiny old woman with the Irish lilt. She sometimes loses track of the hours while staring into that ancient face, listening to that fragile voice recount slivers of the past.

Usually she just listens. But today Jeannine Thompson encounters her friend in a struggle with a lavender blouse. The silk one with ruffles that crest at her neck.

Jeannine tries to help, but the effort becomes an awkward dance around buttons and sleeves. She tucks in the shirt, zips up the white slacks and folds the blanket over the reedy legs that disappear beneath the covers.

"Can you fix my hair?" the tiny voice asks.

"Sure!" Jeannine says. "What do you want me to do?"

"Can you find a comb?"

Sadie Sharpe has a face that long ago lost its tug of war with gravity. But at 101, she still wants to look good for the photographer coming to take her picture. What's left of her fine white hair has been styled, but she doesn't check the mirror. Her vision is clouded by cataracts.

"Do you think I look all right?" she asks Jeannine, hands fluttering up to her curls.

"You look wonderful," says Jeannine, who is 44.

Sadie isn't convinced. She sends Jeannine rooting through drawers for that comb. Sends her fussing, straightening, hiding the bedside toilet with a towel.

When Sadie is satisfied with her room and her hair, Jeannine searches for something to say. By coincidence, she is wearing purple, too.

"Look at us," she yells into Sadie's ear. "We're color-coordinated!"

Their friendship had an awkward start.

One day in April Jeannine appeared, uninvited, in Sadie's life. A volunteer for LifePath Hospice in Tampa, she had just finished 20 hours of training on dealing with the dying. She would be a friend to the end, quite literally, for someone who the doctors predicted had a year to live.

Sadie was her first assignment.

Jeannine had wanted to give something back. Nine months before, a hospice bereavement counselor had helped her cope with her father's sudden death. Her grief was still raw. But if she could turn her pain into compassion for others, maybe it might do some good.

"How do I use this little bit of tragedy and make a little light in the world?" she asked herself. "Like an oyster takes an irritating grain of sand and makes it into a pearl."

It all sounded good. But when her husband dropped her off at the nursing home, her feet grew cold.

"Things are so much easier when they're theoretical," she told him.

"Honey, most things are," he said.

Sadie didn't know what to make of it all when she woke up to find a stranger in her room. Through the cataracts, the face was a patchwork of shadow and light. But she knows a new voice when she hears one.

"Who are you?" she asked the voice.

Jeannine introduced herself, explained that she was there to help. To talk, to listen, whatever Sadie wanted.

Sadie asked her to please go away.

Jeannine didn't sit down, but coaxed a few words out of Sadie. She liked the old woman's feistiness. But would Sadie ever grow to like her? She wasn't sure.

The next visit, Sadie warmed up a bit.

"Some nice young woman from hospice came by," she told Jeannine. "I sent her away."

Jeannine hollered, "That was me."

Today goes like most Saturdays.

Sadie complains that her nursing home roommate has pulled a wheelchair switcheroo.

"She commandeered it!" Sadie tells Jeannine in conspiratorial tones. "She doesn't talk to me at all. She says she can't hear me. But she can hear other people."

They talk about husbands, daughters, hair. Jeannine has learned to be a good listener. When Sadie grows quiet, she weathers the silence. It usually means Sadie is remembering.

"I was Sarah Jane," she says. "My husband didn't like Sarah Jane."

"So he changed it for you?" Jeannine says. She's heard this one before.

"He gave me a pet name." Now everyone calls her Sadie.

"Did you end up liking it?"

"I never did like it," Sadie says. "I just went along with it. But I never did tell my husband that."

Little bits of the past slip out like this. Some memories are indelible, while others slip away.

"The memory goes a lot," Sadie says. "Skids around on you."

Sadie remembers that she was born in Belfast, Ireland, on Feb. 5, 1903. She remembers growing up the middle child of nine. Today she's the last one left.

She remembers in thorough detail the day she left Ireland in her 20s to come to America. Her mother, "an angel, with two gorgeous dimples," was standing in the doorway. Sadie couldn't leave her.

"I don't think I can do this," Sadie said.

"You can," her mother replied.

When Sadie turned back for one last look, her mother had gone inside.

"It was the hardest thing I ever did," she says now.

Sadie remembers meeting James Joseph Sharpe in New York's Grand Central Station. Her daughter Helen Marquiss, who lives in Vermont and talks to Sadie on the phone every day, says her parents met in Ireland. After a century, details slip away.

Sadie remembers that James looked handsome in a police uniform. She remembers putting on a blue wedding gown in 1930 to marry him at a cousin's house in New Jersey.

She remembers opening a beauty parlor with James. He liked cutting hair even more than she did. She kept the books. They stayed married until death did them part.

Sadie doesn't remember much about volunteering for the Red Cross in two world wars. She forgets a lot of names. She doesn't remember her first date with James, or exactly when he died. It was 13 or 14 years ago. Something like that.

On her left hand, Jeannine wears a string of Buddhist prayer beads. She's Catholic but hasn't been to church in a while. Ever since her father's death, she's been a little mad at God.

On her right wrist, she wears a yellow rubber armband, a token from Lance Armstrong's cancer foundation. The bracelet says "Live Strong."

She is searching for peace with the past. She is trying to live on.

After her mother died years ago, Jeannine, an only child, promised herself that she'd take care of her dad when he grew old and sick. When he died so suddenly at a seemingly healthy 79, she felt cheated out of that chance.

In the year that followed, she experienced a spectrum of grief, but with a full-time job in software tech support, with a husband and two young kids, she couldn't afford despair.

In an effort to raise herself from depression, Jeannine tried to teach herself Buddhist meditation. She bought a set of inspirational cards written by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun. One day she pulled out a card that set her back on her heels.

It said: Stop wallowing in self-pity.

She thought: Oh my God, that's what I'm doing!

She called the hospice the next day.

Around Sadie, Jeannine never speaks of her father. She's not supposed to share her troubles with a patient. Sometimes it's a struggle.

"I can't talk about myself," she says. "I have to listen."

She has learned so much from listening, including how hard it is, and how important.

"When I go there, I'm not thinking about other things."

It doesn't fill the void her father left, or curb her anger, or distract her from grief, but it transforms the energy that would be negative into something good.

"These moments with Sadie don't always make up for all the other bad things in the world," Jeannine says. "But they're something."

She says listening to Sadie talk about God has helped restore her own limping faith.

"She's kind of saving my life as we go along."

A few Saturdays ago, Sadie was tired, so tired. Jeannine settled into her chair. During vigils over her sleeping friend, she writes in her journal or naps.

Sadie woke up faded. Jeannine offered her the cookies she'd brought. They were shortbread, the kind Sadie said she liked.

Sadie flickered. Took a nibble.

"God will thank you for this," she told Jeannine.

Jeannine didn't think she was talking about the cookies. She wondered if this was the beginning of the end. She barely got to her car before the tears flowed.

Another time, when Jeannine isn't around, Sadie brings up that day. She remembers a different flavor, though.

"She made me cookies," she says. "Blueberry cookies."

Sadie says she doesn't like blueberry cookies. But she ate them anyway.

Today, as they sit for a portrait, Jeannine leans over and yell-whispers in Sadie's ear. No one else hears but Sadie.

"I love you, you know."

She'd never said it before. She was nervous, like some guy on a date. After all, they've only known each other since April. But the time felt right.

Sadie gave her a look that everyone in the room could feel.

"I love you too, dear."

Moments like this help Jeannine as much as Sadie.

"Bless you," Sadie says as Jeannine rises to leave. Her eyes say everything else. "I hope I see you."

"You will," Jeannine says.

"I will."

- Kim Cross can be reached at 727 893-8352 or kcross@sptimes.com

For information on becoming a hospice volunteer, call LifePath Hospice toll-free at 1-800-209-2200 or visit www.lifepath-hospice.org

[Last modified July 23, 2004, 12:53:51]