Our judge Betsy Howell wrote about her selection of Helen Goehring’s essay: “We learn from people when we stop and really see them, when we know something of their lives, past and present, and all that has made them who they are. The author in this essay sees many reasons for hopefulness, even as the hard realities of life are apparent: illness, aging, disappointment.” Helen Goehring’s remarks when she learned she’d placed in our contest made me happy for days: “I am absolutely thrilled and amazed at this news. Here I am, 80 years old, winning my first writing prize! My children and granddaughter (a sophomore at Wellesley) are very excited and are spreading it all over cyberspace.” Without further ado, here is Helen’s lovely essay:

Taking Notes: Assisted Living
by Helen Goehring

Why is Emily scattered? As an expert comptroller, she’s any development director’s dream. Here at Portland’s Mountain Trails Retirement Community, she’s certainly mine. She delivers board meeting reports before I know I need them. But today she is rushed and anxious and late.

“I have to fly home.” Her New Zealand accent is clipped. Her mother is in a nursing home in Auckland, with Alzheimer’s and a weak heart. “I was jolted out of bed at 2:00 a.m., by a call from a nurse. It can be any time now.”

Emily and her partner, David, are all the family her mother has. David insists on accompanying Emily, and she worries. He is undergoing radiation for kidney cancer. “His immune system is so weak. Will the trip make it worse?” Clouds of fear and sadness fill my office.

“And I definitely have MS.”

It starts to rain.

“Oh, my!” I blurt. I know this storm.

She talks about lesions, MRIs and ABC drugs. I tell her she reminds me of my dear friend who takes a “B” drug and hasn’t had an exacerbation in a decade. “You carry heavy things with grace,” I respond. Young as she is, I don’t tell her  how heavy some things get.

She slips the report in my file and walks away with her usual straight posture, and no more clouds. I hope to see the wind at her back but don’t.

Note to self: Perfect numbers matter less than perfect vulnerability.

Since our cafeteria doesn’t serve powerful stories, I skip lunch and head to Assisted Living. Strokes, cancer, major surgery – these are the hurdles that residents here leap. They unroll the scrolls of their histories before me, and campaign deadlines, my grown children’s challenges and my financial concerns evaporate. But what will it be like for me when I am in AL?

Too late. Off the elevator, Denise from Activities is at my side. She is our youthful, personal Jack Benny, making infectious, deadpan jokes and impossibly artful cakes. I’ll get a four-layered one, when I’m 90. She thinks that’s years away. It’s not. I’m 75.

It’s been thirty years since I left my children’s father. There was no book on how to pay tuition and mortgage bills, then. Trying to recover from dot.com losses years later made capturing this job at 69 like winning the Lottery. My children are gifted and responsible citizens. But I’m determined not to be dependent on them.

“I have something for you!” Denise pulls me back, and guides me into her office. She hands me a Lenten prayer book from Portland Congregational Church. “Yours to keep!”

I am deeply touched; she knows what my Catholicism means to me. I promise her a copy of my Lenten journey for St. Peter’s magazine. Then I ask about her son’s colon cancer treatment.

“Oh, he ate soft foods today,” she says, triumphantly. “We are so relieved. We can’t endure losing another.”

“Another?”

“Desert Storm. A piece of shrapnel went through his brain.”

What do I say? She lost a child on the battlefield of a war that never should have been. I can’t imagine losing one of my boys. And she has another son with cancer! What do I say? I don’t say anything. I tuck Denise’s treasure into my briefcase.

Note to self: Some people reach for joy, when they lose the biggest things. Some make cakes. What is my cake? Writing my memoirs? Taking a class in the Books of Wisdom? This?

I proceed down the hall, pass the nurse’s station and find myself on the receiving end of a giant-size hug. The benefactor? Ravishing Nurse Judy. “I love my job!” She flashes her customary grin. Diabetes has left her with prosthetic legs. At 45 she still has a beautiful body, and joy surrounds her like a blanket of daisies. She opens her phone to show me a picture of her with her husband on their tenth wedding anniversary. “My husband loves me. What else matters?” I don’t even know how to “pull up” a picture, but I ask if she’ll email it to me, anyway.

Note to self: There is beauty with no expiration date and no physical limits. Learn to download.

Diane and Raleigh are one of my favorite couples. In their apartment there are hippo tusks, a cheetah carving, and baskets woven from birch bark. I’m a 12-year-old in the house of wonders, as they have shared their missionary life in Africa: how Diane felt protected by the tribes in the bush; how Raleigh bowed his head in reverence, when she gave birth to their daughter, and the midwife scolded him: “After all that your wife has been through, you fall asleep!” Diane describes the Zulu women, so regal with their backpacks tied to them. “They said we brought hope.” She slips a piece of ivory from an elephant’s tusk into my pocket. “It’s supposed to bring a blessing,” she whispers.

Note to self: If hope is in the African bush, hope is in this room.

Before I head back to the office to prepare my campaign report, I visit Mary. An Oberlin College graduate, Mary lost her husband, a Presbyterian minister, when she had four young children. She spent her teacher’s salary on good literature and periodicals for her children. On her lap sit the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times, opened to a Kristof column.

Mary and I are soul mates. I spot her daughter’s book, A Social Worker’s Perspective on Domestic Violence. My son wrote an impassioned book about Mozart’s opera, Cosi Fan Tutti. On her nightstand, I see Richard Wilbur’s collected poetry. My daughter’s favorite poem, The Writer, is by him. It ends: “…I wish/what I wished you before, but harder.”

I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Note to self: Suggest Richard Wilbur to Saturday’s poetry group. Wish harder.

My final stop is Jack’s room. His room is my Africa. The people who pass his door are missing out on a lot, but I must say that his entrance is not inviting. First there is that pumping sound, and then the menacing red and black sign: “Oxygen in Use. No Smoking or Open Flames.” Nobody wants to be in that room. The teacher, the missionary, and CEO all agree that there is no soft place to land in that room. But Jack peers over the diagnosis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and extends his hand, anyway.

I love Jack. In the 1930s, after he finished high school, he hitchhiked from Michigan to Seattle, and took a freighter to China. A Huck Finn of sorts, he learned Mandarin Chinese from the sailors and thumbed his way through China. In Manchuria, a fellow Japanese hiker said “go back.” Japan was about to invade China. “I owe my life to the kindness of that stranger,” reflects Jack. I whispered a quiet prayer of thanks.

Note to self: Learn Dutch, rather than Mandarin. Think about kind strangers who have saved your life. Learn to be one. Sit next to that homeless man who smells bad on the #2 bus, smile and say “Good morning!”

I navigate these corridors to find proof that this is not a village of shut-ins. Rather, listening to their stories opens the doors of my heart. I look at my watch and realize that I have an agenda to prepare for this afternoon’s department meeting. I stop by the deli to pick up a sandwich to eat in my office. Kay Anderson, in front of me, hovers over her walker. Although she can’t see me, she recognizes my voice when I ask how she is. “Nothing could have prepared me for old age.” I love her honesty. “The worst part is being blind.”

“I’m sure that it is especially hard for someone like you who loves to read.”

“You bet it is,” she barks. “Thank goodness I have all of my marbles!”

She orders three root beer floats, two sandwiches and two enormous chocolate chip cookies. “We’re having a picnic on our floor,” she declares like a teenager going to her first coed event. “Please join us.” I declined, for I have a staff meeting.

“There ought to be a law against Monday meetings. You need a day off, after partying all weekend.” I agree.

Note to self. Keep Mondays free. Buy more marbles. Protect them.

Back in my office, I pull out my briefcase, and open the file with a perfect excel sheet inside. And a book of Lenten prayer. And a bone that’s a blessing. I turn on my computer, and a picture of a woman without legs, but with her husband’s strong arms around her pops up.

Later, navigating the hill up to my apartment, I reflect on my day. If Denise is lucky, then I can be lucky. If these folks – the Greatest Generation that endured the Great Depression and the Great War (I don’t understand who would call a war “Great”) – then I bow my head, too. Don’t be discouraged; you know people who ended Nazism. You’ve visited a couple who smile at each other, after 60 years and who stood alongside regal people from another land. You know someone who bakes impossible cakes.

Note to self: The wind is at your back.

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Helen’s own words on writing and revising this work allow us to see in action how a personal essay develops and how we recognize that we have not fully mined the occasion from which we wrote:

Writing has always fed my spirit. Journaling and working on my memoirs always gets me in tune with the inside of my heart, whether the page is filled with giggles or wet with tears. My children’s triumphs, a job promotion, a divorce or the death of a loved one — are all apt subjects for typing those words on my computer or scrawling them with my arthritic hand on my scratchy, tattered journal.

When Sheila’s summer contest invited us to write essays on the question, “What has inspired you?” the answer was simple: the residents and staff at Mountain Trails Retirement Community, where I had worked. Every night when I’d come home, I would journal about the amazing people with whom I had walked the corridors that day.

Additionally, writing is my advocacy tool, through letters to the editor and the opinion pieces with which I laud a remarkable column or advocate for the voiceless. And even though it’s specifically the newsletters, appeals and proposals I write that have raised money, I think of all writing as philanthropy: the love of mankind.

Having the opportunity to work with Sheila in developing an initial draft into a polished, compelling piece was a superb learning experience. She considered Taking Notes: Assisted Living from the perspective of a curious bystander looking through the window and wondering. She pointed out where there was so much activity, that she was losing track of where I was going, as I navigated Mountain Trails’ halls. Complimenting me on the “Note to Self” sections, she encouraged me to make them thematic. That challenged me to rethink what each resident or staff member was teaching me and how very much all of them mean to me, to this day.

Sheila suggested possible notes, and even though I didn’t use all of them, this process challenged me to look more specifically at what I want the reader to hear. Her comments encouraged me to tie the ending in with the beginning, too, and that made it a real story, rather than a series of unrelated notes. Coherent. Knit together. Stitch by stitch.

Finally, Sheila was tuned to my emotional clock. She noticed my tears, and that helped me examine my relationship to each person more deeply. Doing so then brought up other memories, such as the deaths of loved ones that I had experienced. She made the point that the “Note to Self” refrain gave a greater context to experiences that otherwise would have read only as ongoing bad news from the corridors. “It was a hard sell to read about one person after another facing difficult challenges,” Sheila observed. She helped convert this piece into my teaching tool. Hopefully, my comments will be a part of the tools she uses to teach other writers.

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I am very pleased with Helen’s work and think she has indeed created a teaching tool, a memorable one that can change the way her readers look at people and their lives.