Encounter with an Ancestor: Janet Schaefer

This is the third story in a series. The first introduces Janet's friend Brooke, and the second documents an evening of conversation between Janet and Brooke and others. Readers are welcome to start where they please, including here:

Janet loved to tell the story of returning from a meditation retreat, where after a week of repeating a lovingkindness chant, strangers approached her like never before, wondering about her energy, and a deer even walked up to her out of the woods. Even when she wasn't glowing with that post-retreat aura, though, Janet had a welcoming vibe that made people feel safe around her.

Janet had a playful spirit and she approached progressive memory loss with an enlightened acceptance. She lived art, painting all the cabinetry in her house with blue background and bright fishes, so that it looked like a big aquarium, each shape made in the simplest possible form.

2025

After a decade of steady decline with dementia, Janet had a fall on Christmas Day, and she spent the next couple days in the ICU. Her husband Eric texted me from the hospital, and I came over to visit the room she’d moved into there, after making it out of the ICU. She was disoriented, asking about her cats, forgetting their names, telling me about a painting on the wall that wasn’t on the wall. She still remembered me, which was a comfort and a relief. 

I asked Eric how he was doing; he told me how their dog, PopPop, mourned every time he left the house, and how Janet mourned every time he left her side. Splitting life between home and hospital was wearing on him. 

After her condition had plateaued, Eric took Janet home. The hospital still had tests and therapy lined up, but it was a Friday, so therapy wouldn’t be happening until Monday, with far-from-guaranteed results, and after several days of tests, it was already becoming evident that no one was going to be able to tell him why she fell. She wanted to see those cats, and Eric made it happen. 

The next day when I saw Janet, I was shocked to see her get up out of the bed and walk to the bathroom unassisted. Their home was such a warm contrast to the sterility of the hospital, with carpeting and animals and art all over the walls, Janet’s and others’.

She was much more oriented, too, engaging me in conversation about a book filled with cat pictures. She asked where I lived, forgetting that she’d been to my house, and when I told her, she asked if I ever met Brooke who lived nearby. I took delight in telling her the story of my connection to Brooke, which started with Janet introducing the two of us, and she was fully engaged in listening. There’s something really special about the in-the-moment-ness of dementia, similar to how some kids love to hear the same story over and over. 

During Janet’s week in the hospital, no one had brought up hospice or palliative, even though several things about Janet’s case made her a clear candidate: low weight, unexplained falls, recent hospitalization, history of cancer, dementia. I made a phone call to a friend in the admissions department of the hospice I used to work for, crying over the phone while I described her situation. 

It turned out that Janet’s address was outside of that hospice’s range, so I did a bit of research to find a well-rated nonprofit hospice nearby. I made the call, with Eric’s consent, and set up a visit for Monday morning. I described to him how the visit didn’t mean that Janet would be admitted to hospice, and that the primary purpose was informational. He seemed open either way.

I was not surprised to hear that Janet was admitted to hospice. Her twice-weekly visits from a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) to bathe her were a welcome level of care, even if slightly embarrassing to Janet. When Eric expressed his gratitude for the care he was receiving from them, I felt proud to have played a role in making that connection.

On my next visit, later that week, Eric and Janet and I took a walk outside, all the way to the creek, and I wondered whether Janet would recover enough to “graduate” from hospice, where a patient‘s prognosis becomes longer than 6 months (yay) and the patient is no longer eligible for services (not yay). We walked by the lotus ponds that Eric had built out of bathtubs. In recent years, Janet had become obsessed with the lotuses, but today she didn’t mention them. When I asked how to plant the seeds she’d given me, Eric stepped in to describe the steps, scraping the shell down to the white part, then putting them in water and refreshing the water daily until they sprout, then into the pond. 

With Janet’s passing on April 7 of this year, it feels appropriate to focus our attention on her, with warmth, as her spirit navigates the bardo. Next month we can return our attention to Brooke.

Note: a previous version of this post shared the story of Janet’s final breaths. In order to offer some privacy to the intimacy of those moments, I have removed that section, as of July 24.