Mary Kaplan, Eunice Morres and George Peters, all clients of the Louis and
Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center participate in a yoga class. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Mary Jane Fine
Jacobo remembers. He remembers how Frances forgot. She forgot asking about a grandchild’s well-being, so she asked again. She forgot where she left a glass, where she left her keys. Forgot how to find her way to or from places she once knew well. She forgot and forgot and forgot until her forgetting couldn’t be smiled at any longer or dismissed or hoped away.
That was when Jacobo Goldstein realized that the life he and Frances had lived must change, and soon. It was 2005 when he retired as White House correspondent for CNN’s Spanish-language Radio Noticias, when the Goldsteins left their suburban Virginia home and moved to Boca Raton, where their daughter lived and where she’d heard about a new facility for people with memory impairment. Within a month of arriving in Florida, Frances Goldstein began spending her days at the Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center on the Boca campus of Florida Atlantic University.
At the center, Frances found happiness in an art class. Jacobo found happiness in her happiness — and a caregiver’s much-needed respite.
“If you’re a caretaker, it takes a toll on you,” he says. “My wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1997, but for five or six years it was slow-going and we were able to handle it. The center gave me a few hours for myself because I knew she was in a safe place.”
The Memory and Wellness Center, a part of FAU’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing, opened in 2001 with a start-up grant from the National Institute of Health, Administration on Aging and a $1.5 million donation from Louis and Anne Green that brought matching funds from the state.
In 2005, the center — it houses both a diagnostic clinic and an adult day care center — became a state-designated Memory Disorder Clinic, one of 15 in Florida.
Last month, the center was the first of its kind to be designated a “Specialized Alzheimer’s Services Center” by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration’s Division of Health Quality Assurance.
“We just identified a need,” Louis Green says of the center that he and his wife first envisioned a decade before it was realized. “Dementia is a terrible affliction. The real victims are the families. The patients, eventually, don’t know. Annie and I didn’t feel there were adequate facilities to deal with this. Why did we do it? It needed to be done.”
The Greens spent 10 years trying to interest someone in opening a center, Louis Green says, “but people don’t like to think about [dementia]. Then FAU found it in their hearts to work with us. If it weren’t for M.J. Saunders, the president of FAU, and [contractor/architect] Bill Wietsma, who developed the plans — gratis — it wouldn’t have happened.”
On a recent morning, a day care participant, Fanya, (her family asked to withhold her last name) had just put the last daubs on a pointillist painting. “It’s a rainbow,” she said, nodding at the small canvas.
“I studied art in college. I graduated in 1952. I graduated from … oh my gosh …” Silent, she fanned the air with her hands, as if to clear a fog. “Sometimes, I don’t remember the words,” she said, and then, triumphantly, “Rockford College! I got my BA and, a week later, I got my Mrs.”
Anne and Louis Green provided money to create the
memory center that bears their name. Photo provided
Fanya’s teacher, Patricia Saidon, who runs the Center’s art program, taught Frances Goldstein, too. “Don’t forget your walker,” she reminded Fanya, as an aide escorted her to the next activity, chair exercise with 92-year-old yoga instructor Vera Paley.
Lunch would follow and, if she chose to, Fanya could engage in gardening and table games, music and shuffleboard, current events and, as promised in a brochure, “lots of parties.”
The center doesn’t sideline family members, offering them support groups, help with stress reduction, memory-disorder education and professional counseling. A library room stocks floor-to-ceiling shelves with brochures and books on memory loss, aging, health and associated legal and financial matters.
Specialists conduct initial evaluations to determine the nature and extent of a patient’s memory problem and to provide family members with feedback and suggestions for what strategies and/or treatment would be best.
Vera Paley, 92, leads clients of the Louis and Anne Green Memory and
Wellness Center at Florida Atlantic University in a yoga class.
Photos by Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
Day care rates at the nonprofit center range from $45 for a half day to $87 for a full day, with subsidies available for those who qualify; manager Barbara Curtis says that Caring Hearts-sponsored “scholarships” are benefiting 19 of the Center’s current 120 participants.
On a tour of the facility, Christine Dardet, media representative for the center, pauses in front of a colorful framed poster titled Fish, which Jacobo Goldstein had made from one of his wife’s paintings, after her death in 2009; he sold copies and donated proceeds to the center.
“It’s a special place, being a nurse-led center,” Dardet says. “It’s a soft spot for me, too, because my father-in-law had Alzheimer’s. We lived through that as young people. It was hard for my mother-in-law, having him check out but still be there, physically.”
In December, Dardet says, the center got an expansion commitment from Louis and Anne Green, who live in the Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club. Construction on the 5,000-square-foot addition is scheduled to begin this spring and be completed by year’s end.
Jacobo Goldstein couldn’t be more pleased. “It’s the best place I’ve ever seen,” he says. “The Greens have done an incredible job.”
Jacobo Goldstein (top) had a poster (above) made from a painting by his late wife, Frances, who was a client of the memory center.
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