The Stranger at the Window Rebecca McClanahan Here's your first assignment," says the hospice coordinator, "ifyou want to take it. White male, seventy-four years old." My father's age, I'm thinking. "I see by your records that you're okay with Alzheimer's. Some volunteers won't touch it." "My mother nursed her father for years." "His wife says his hands are busy aU the time—a scratcher and a grabber. And his language is gone." "I'm fine with that." "She's exhausted. She can reaUy use the help." "FU be there tomorrow." "She says he's a sweet man, not a mean bone in his body." The woman who answers the door is trim, about seventy, with a fuU sensuous mouth painted coral. Her thick dark hair is coifed in a '60s bouffant. She smiles and leads me to the den where a man with silver hair is propped against a sofa back, a flowered sheet tucked neatly beneath him. "We've been married fifty-two years," she says. "Can you beUeve it? Where did the time go?" Her husband is dressed in steam-pressed peach-and-white striped pajamas over a clean white T-shirt. "Do you think he might be cold?" she asks. Together we maneuver her husband's stifflimbs into a velour robe. He smiles up at me, his blue eyes squinting mischievously. "He's over the angry stage," she says. "And the wandering. He used to get lost. He'd just wander out the door." Apparently his wandering is now confined to his mind—and his hands. Every arm of the chairs and sofa is shredded. "I tried an Alzheimer's apron. Do you know what that is?" I teU her yes, I've seen them in nursing homes—aprons stitched with buttons, shoelaces, snaps to keep the patients' hands busy. 66 Rebecca McClanahan67 "But he kept puUing offthe fringe baUs, putting them in his mouth." He yanks free the sheet that's been tucked over the sofa, then puUs at the belt of his robe, as if to say where is the end of this thing, seeming not to understand that it is attached to him. She takes his hands, smoothes them, clucks soothingly, "There, there." She reaches behind the couch and brings out a bright yeUow box of Legos. "He likes the red ones," she says. Volunteering is only in part a way to repay that which has been given. It is also a cry to be needed, to be used.Volunteers often say that they get back more than they give, and I used to consider this a false sentiment, equivalent to the modest pooh-poohing that foUows a compliment. Now I know they are right. We do what we do because we need to. Something in the act ofvolunteering confers on even the most selfish individual a mantle ofgenerosity and caring. The middle-aged man sitting beside me at the first hospice volunteer session needs badly to tell us how badly he is needed. He frowns, crosses his arms over his chest. "People say, how can you do this? I mean, how can you not do it, how can you not help someone? What kind of world would that be?" It's an eclectic group gathered around the table—black, white, young, old, male, female. Most have been caregivers to family members or friends and wish to repay the hospice community for the help they received. The burly, bearded computer salesman, who more closely resembles a lumberjack , has buried a mother; the elderly gentlemen with an eastern European accent, a wife; the blond middle-aged woman, a brother to AIDS. Others have different agendas. The energetic nurse wants something useful to do on her day off. The dark-haired, dark-eyed girl wearing aU black is a graduate student in architecture, studying how to make buüdings that encourage the best kind of dying. What I end up telling the group is how, for many years, I watched my mother care for her father. Alzheimer's is a slow and excruciating descent to the grave, and at times my mother appeared to suffer more from his disease...