How I Found My Reason

I spent a long time looking for work that felt like it meant something. I tried things. I wondered. I carried a quiet, low-grade sense that I was supposed to have figured it out by now.

Then I walked into memory care.

What I expected, and what I found

I thought I’d be helping people. I imagined solutions, the right answers at the right moment. What I found instead was a hallway full of people the wider world had quietly stopped paying attention to.

They were funny. They had opinions about music. They still reached for each other’s hands. One woman cried when someone remembered that she used to teach piano.

I had not expected to feel so welcome.

Joyce

Her name was Joyce Elaine. She had humor and a particular way of seeing things that I still think about. Her friendship changed the direction of my life — not because she was exceptional in some easy-to-describe way, but because she was herself, fully, in a place where a lot of people stop expecting that.

When I think about what Joyfully Elaine is for, I come back to her.

The work happens in ordinary places: a craft table, a boutique, a box, a story. What’s underneath it is the question Joyce left me with — what if more people felt that?

I’m still working on the answer.