A couple of times a week, Sue Hoyt of Bangor hops in her car and drives across town to visit her friend Lavon Harris.
“I usually just go over for tea,” Hoyt said. “We just sit and talk.”
But sometimes, Hoyt, who is 71, helps Harris, who is 97, with a little housekeeping project, such as sorting through a closet or organizing a photo album. Or they go out leaf-peeping, grocery shopping or to the hair salon. It’s Harris who calls the shots.
“I just show up and say, ‘You’re the boss of me. What are we doing today?’’’ Hoyt said, during a recent visit in the tidy mobile home Harris rents in a Union Street park.
Harris’ home is full of family photos — her late husband Gil, her two sons, her daughter, six grandchildren, too many great-grandchildren to reckon. Most live in Maine, some in the Bangor area, but it’s hard for them to come visit regularly, Harris explained.
Her younger son, in his 70s, is recovering from a recent stroke. Her older son recently broke his arm and is unable to make the long drive to Bangor from his home in Mattawamkeag. Her daughter’s husband is coping with a serious medical problem. The grandchildren are busy with school, careers and lives of their own.
“When I moved here I was driving. I could go anywhere I wanted to go,” the cheerful nonagenarian said. But since she gave up her license a few years ago, she’s felt less connected to her loved ones. So she was glad when a friend referred her to the Senior Companion program, a federally funded program run out of the University of Maine Center on Aging. The statewide program connects active volunteers 55 and older with socially isolated clients, and, a little over three years ago, it’s what brought Hoyt and Harris into each other’s lives.
“She’s like the sister I never had,” Harris said, giving Hoyt a warm hug. “Without her, I’d be here all by myself. She takes me anywhere I want to go.” She paused with a mischievous smile. “It’s a good thing I don’t want to go out west.” The two laughed at what was clearly a familiar joke between them, then settled down for a chat.
Volunteers and clients both benefit
Sue Hoyt is one of about 85 Senior Companion volunteers who together visit about 350 elderly Mainers each week in their homes, according to Terri Eldridge of the Maine Center on Aging.
“The volunteers say they get as much out of the program as the clients do,” Eldridge said. Volunteers must be low income and at least 55 to qualify for the program, which provides a small hourly stipend and gas mileage. But Eldridge said the average volunteer is an 80-year-old single woman. Some are in their 90s, she said.
“It’s important to feel needed and have something to do,” Eldridge said.“They feel like this is a job, and the clients come to feel like family.” In addition, she said, the stipend — $2.65 per hour, excluding travel time, plus 30 cents per mile for gas — is small but sometimes enough to make a real difference in the slender budget that many volunteers live on. “It can add up to a couple hundred bucks a month, and that can help maintain a car and keep it on the road,” she said.
For clients, there is no income requirement, but they must be 55 or older, living in their own home, alone during the day and no longer driving. While family members, friends and neighbors may be present and attentive, Eldridge said it is often the case that the volunteer is the only person the client sees on any kind of predictable schedule.
With an annual budget in Maine of about $300,000 per year, Senior Companions employs a director and a small staff of field agents to cover the state. They’re responsible for recruiting, training, performing background checks and assigning local volunteers to serve their regions.
Field staff also interface with organizations that serve older Mainers, including the state’s five agencies on aging, home nursing agencies and programs such as Meals on Wheels, to help identify vulnerable older Mainers who would benefit from regular visits with a volunteer.
Volunteers may interact socially, play games, help with light tasks and meals, supervise medications and take a client out for errands, appointments and meals. They are not allowed to do routine household chores, prepare meals, provide hands-on personal care or handle any financial transactions.
The program typically asks volunteers to visit three or four clients for about two hours twice a week, depending on their needs, geographic location and other factors. In 2015, Senior Companion volunteers traveled more than 217,200 miles and logged nearly 63,800 visit hours. The program is always looking for more volunteers and more clients, Eldridge said, since both come and go with some regularity.
“We’re trying to grow, but it stays pretty steady,” she said.
‘Out and doing’
Volunteer Virginia Anderson, 62, lives in Parkman, “in a little house way out in the woods,” she said. Last year, she sold her secondhand business and commercial building in Guilford and retired. “But it turns out I’m not quite as retired as I thought I would be,” she said, since the buyer wasn’t able to make a go of the business and reneged on the owner-financing deal.
“So now I’m back at it,” she said.
Even though she spends a couple of days per week in the store — it’s open by chance and by appointment — she’s also visiting five elderly residents her area each week. “It’s important to be getting out there and doing things with other people,” she said. “There are more important things to focus on than business and work and surviving. It’s important to connect.”
A relative newcomer to Senior Companions, Anderson said it’s rewarding to spend time with her elderly clients. “I had been looking for something I could volunteer to do,” she said. “As you get older, you’re looking for ways to give back. It’s just a plain old good thing to do.”
But the program’s structure, including training, background checks, workload and stipend, add to its value. “It all makes you feel like you’re actually worth something,” she said. “Volunteering can get old. You can feel like you give and give and give. But as an elderly person, you want to feel valued and appreciated.”
Anderson, who says she does not always find it easy to socialize, said the program also is serving as an early warning system for her own life. “I realize that it’s very easy to get yourself in a situation where you’re very isolated, and you don’t even realize it until you’re already in trouble,” she said. “If I don’t keep myself out and doing, if I don’t stay active and healthy, if I don’t have connections, someday I’m going to be in deep water.”
For Sue Hoyt — who grew up on Peak’s Island, homesteaded in Piscaquis County in the 1970s and ’80s, completed a bachelor’s degree at 50 and retired four years ago from a late-life career in social services and crisis intervention — Senior Volunteers also satisfies an important need.
“I have some physical problems and didn’t think I could hold a regular job any more,” she said. “But I wasn’t ready to sit around my apartment and wait to die, either.”
She now visits four clients each week, including, in addition to Lavon Harris, a woman living with disabilities caused by a stroke; another woman whose family is attentive but unable to manage the increasing burden of her needs; and a man whose advancing Alzheimer’s disease has left him with no short-term recall but a rich trove of old memories.
“He told me he wanted to write a book about his life, so I got a book and a pen and he just started talking all about it,” Hoyt said. “Everyone has a story to tell.”
For more information about Senior Companions, visit https://umaine.edu/seniorcompanion online or phone 207-262-7929.
