Island Senior: The Memory Cafe

Dave Price Draws at Memory Cafe – Photo Peggy Sue McRae

Island Senior is written by Peggy Sue McRae…

Last week I stopped by the Village at the Harbour to participate in a Memory Café. Memory Cafe programs originated in England about 15 years ago and have since become popular throughout Europe and the United States. The goal of the Memory Café is to provide a friendly gathering place where people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of Dementia and their caregivers can enjoy activities in a relaxed, supportive, and social atmosphere.

Having read about Memory Cafes, Beth Helstien at our public library reached out to local organizations to see if together they could offer Memory Cafes regularly here. This resulted in a partnership with rotating programs taking place at the San Juan Island Library, the Mullis Center, the Village at the Harbour, and the Life Care Center, with each location featuring one program per month.

Each Café has a theme or project. As Beth explained, “The first program at the Library was centered around the theme of flight, with Frank Sinatra singing Take Me to the Moon and Come Fly with Me on YouTube, building paper airplanes, looking at books about airplanes, birds and butterflies, and eating delicious edibles supplied by the kitchen at the Village at the Harbour.”

Last Thursday the theme at the Village was arts and crafts. A simple project was provided with paper, wooden shapes, felt pens, and more colored pencils than I have ever seen in one place. I joined with Village residents, staff, and volunteers around the art table drawing and coloring shapes and enjoying the conversation as our time together very pleasantly sailed by.

My Mom has been gone for a few years now but she was a Village resident and during the last part of her life I was her primary caregiver. She suffered from Dementia so I’m familiar with the challenges of finding suitable and enjoyable activities for her. If Memory Cafes had existed then I’m pretty sure we would have been regulars.

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