KSHB 41 News anchor Lindsay Shively offers coverage on a wide variety of topics, including stories of interest to consumers. She learned of this story while at the recent KSHB Let's Talk event in Lee's Summit. Reach out to Linsday via email.
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Have you ever heard of a memory cafe? It's meant to be a relaxing social time for anyone dealing with memory loss or changes, and for their caregivers.
I met Amy Stevens at our Let's Talk event. She walked in with a brochure ready to tell me all about their newly launched Lee's Summit Memory Cafe because she knows there are people in her community and beyond who need it.
Jan Sanderson knows the life of a caregiver.
"I had stopped sleeping because he would wander away in the middle of the night," Jan told me.
Her husband of five decades battled Lewy Body Dementia for about five years.
"When we were still going out in public, I carried little business cards with me that said my loved one has dementia, please be patient," she said. "When dementia gets bad, you don't go to social functions, you don't go out to eat. It's pretty lonely."
And that's why she will be volunteering at the Lee's Summit Memory Cafe.
"I'm hoping that I can help people feel more connected than I felt in the beginning," Jan says.
Amy told me she hopes the cafe offers a chance for caregivers and loved ones to have fun and relax.
"You just come and sit and have a good time," Amy said. So it's easy. It's an hour long, and it's something that caregivers and the individual living with dementia can do together."
Stevens and her mom, Margaret Franklin, worked with St Anne's Episcopal Church to help launch the Lee's Summit Memory Cafe. They say Amy's father is facing dementia.
"He was diagnosed two and a half years ago, and we just found out last month that it's Lewy Body," Margaret said.
The memory cafe serves purely as a chance for caregivers and loved ones facing memory loss to come be social together - an hour of fun, food, and themes in an accepting space. They're getting ready for their third in November.
"Because even if an individual is struggling, maybe to follow the conversation or struggling with the facts or the timeline of a conversation, they're still enjoying that interaction," Stevens said. "And it's still important to make that interaction inclusive of them."
"We don't have enough social engagement programs in this area," Michelle Niedens, director of the Cognitive Care Network at the University of Kansas Health System, told me.
She sees a profound impact from programs like memory cafes and being social.
"And what does that do? What that does is allow, we think, you know, when people are socially engaged on a regular basis, disease implications slow down," Niedens said. "In other words, we are able to retain function longer."
"We gotta deal with grief, but we also have to continue to see what lives, because that will allow us to survive," she said.
Jan will be volunteering in honor of her husband who passed away earlier this year.
"He was the person who loved me unconditionally, and I hope I can give that to other people," Jan told me.
You can find this directory online through the Memory Cafe Alliance.
The next Lee's Summit Memory Cafe will meet next at 10 a.m. on Nov. 15, St. Anne's Episcopal Church.
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