The Charles Press, Publishers
Review of A Loving Voice
USA Today, April 7, 1992Deirdre Donohue
Inevitably, the best ideas are often the simplest. And the most obvious. Every weekend, millions of well-meaning people head out to nursing homes and hospices to visit elderly or ill relatives and friends. And they sit there in awkward, guilt-filled silence.
Carolyn Banks, 51, and Janis Rizzo, 35, have come up with a solution. They have co-edited A Loving Voice: A Caregiver’s Book of Read-Aloud Stories for the Elderly. The book presents 52 selections—poems, fiction, autobiographical stories—that are appropriate to read aloud to an older person. The authors range from the famous—Louise Erdrich—to the unknown.
The author of four suspense novels, Banks says what many are reluctant to admit: that conversation can be very difficult because “you don’t want to tell them what’s going on in your life while they are stuck” in a nursing home.
Published by a Philadelphia house that specializes in coping issues, A Loving Voice springs from personal experience. Rizzo’s father was hospitalized with a brain tumor and Banks visited her mother-in-law in a nursing home each week. In addition, Banks also worked as an activities director for an adult day-care center.
It was hard work, she recalls. “You had to keep them awake.” She didn’t feel comfortable reading them children’s books aloud and other suggestions, like reading the Declaration of Independence, were just silly.
Banks feels strongly that even when an old person appears totally senile, “you can get to those people.”
The two women tested the stories and poems on different groups of older people and edited the final selections so that they would be easy to understand when read aloud. While Rizzo and Banks focused on finding upbeat stories that would stir childhood memories, they included one story that involves the death of an old man who joyfully rejoins his wife.
Banks and Rizzo steered clear of swear words, and while subtle eroticism was appreciated, “we found that it was better not to have overt steamy stuff…there was a lot of shuffling when those stories were read aloud,” she says with a laugh.
In the end, Banks hopes that A Loving Voice will help those who read as well as those who listen. “It’s for people who go to visit—to fill the time in a way that matters.
