Companions make seniors feel at home

Every Thursday 75-year-old Fae Critchlow takes her friend Kathleen Millar, 89, shopping or to the doctor and then out to lunch. "It's our girls' day out," she said. This has been their routine since November 1998.

Critchlow is Millar's senior companion, provided through a Catholic Charities program. She helps Millar keep her independence. Her aid allows Millar to stay in her own apartment rather than move to a nursing home or live with her daughter.

It also allows Millar to keep a pace that prompts her grandchildren to call her Turbo, "because I never stop," she said. As she tells a story of how she handled her apartment manager during a recent dispute, it is easy to see that Turbo is an appropriate nickname.

Millar is legally blind, nearly deaf and has a heart condition that gives her dizzy spells, but her physical condition doesn't dampen the enthusiasm that is evident as she recounts in a soft brogue to a reporter the story of her emigration from Scotland to the United States at age 17.

As much as Millar gets from Catholic Charities' senior companion program, she isn't the only one who benefits. The program gives just as much back to its volunteer aids.

Senior companions are low-income people 60 or older who serve 20 hours each week providing friendship and assistance to seniors or anyone else who has a problem with daily tasks. They assist with paying bills, grocery shopping, and finding transportation to medical appointments.

Helping her friends is something Critchlow did long before she applied to be a Senior Companion four years ago. She had been taking friends who needed the help to the store or the doctor or just sitting with them to alleviate loneliness for years. Now she spends 20 hours each week volunteering for Catholic Charities.

For the time, she and other volunteers receive a stipend of about $50 per week plus meals and gas reimbursement while they are working, Maria Dent, program manager, said. Volunteers also get help on making their own lives run smoothly -- seminars such as how to dress inexpensively or pedestrian safety.

Catholic Charities provides about 140 volunteers for about 600 clients, Dent said. Clients are matched with volunteers by several agencies outside Catholic Charities, so there is no way to know how many seniors may be awaiting companions. However, if someone with a real need for a companion asks for one, everything possible is done to get one quickly, she said.

Those waiting for companions are listed by need.

Those who are mobile and in relatively good health, regardless of their age, are not as high on the priority list as those who have health problems or are less mobile. "There are other ways to get around and to get companionship," Dent said.

Other options, Dent said, include using Citizens Area Transit's paratransit program or the city bus to get to the grocery store and the doctor's office, as Millar does. Millar walks every Friday to a local Albertson's, where she picks up a trolley downtown to play the nickle slots. When Millar goes to the store on her own, she said, employees help the blind woman find her purchases.

In addition to offering clients mobility, the senior companion program alleviates boredom, loneliness and depression for those it serves. However, Catholic Charities offers other programs as well for those purposes.

The group offers a telephone reassurance program to provide seniors with a daily telephone call. "Sometimes the calls last as long as it takes to say 'Just checking up, how are you? OK, talk to you tomorrow.' Sometimes the calls last half an hour," Dent said.

Program volunteers call each client at the same time every day, so that if there is no answer, they know to call a family member or the police to ask for someone to check on the client in person.

"Our clients rely on us once they start to use this service. Sometimes they will give the volunteer who calls them directions on what to do with pets if something happens to them," Dent said.

In addition to visits from her senior companion, Millar receives a telephone call every day from a volunteer who talks to her about her family and makes her feel connected to the world outside her apartment. "We have good conversations," Millar said.

Millar has other resources that allow her to remain in her own apartment. She has a homemaker who comes for six hours each week from the state Division for Aging to clean her home, do her laundry and help her shower. She receives books on tape through the mail, allowing her to listen to the mystery books that she can no longer read.

The most important thing to Millar is that she not be stuck inside her apartment alone all the time. "That's so annoying. I can't stand it. I have to get out there," she said.

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