Once Sue Heine could practically hear the relief on the other end of the phone line. For a week and a half she hadn’t been able to call the elderly woman. “It was just too busy.” When she finally dialed the number, as always spontaneously and without an agreed time, according to Heine, the 86-year-old audibly felt a weight lifted and she said: “I was already worried.” The concern could have been many things: that something had happened to her godmother, that she no longer felt like it or had become ill. But the worry may also simply have been the fear of renewed loneliness. Because the Unterhachinger senior had suffered a lot from Corona. A year and a half ago, she was very happy to have found a regular conversation partner in 62-year-old Sue Heine.
“We know many older people who spend a lot of time with their own thoughts, although they would like to share them with younger people,” writes Annett Lütke-Holz on the Taufkirchen neighborhood help website. She is the contact person for arranging sponsorships for seniors and she would like to be called more often. Because far too few people use the offer of neighborhood help, on both sides. What many people don’t know is that they could easily volunteer to help older people just by lending their ear. And above all, many senior citizens do not know that this possibility exists. Some may also doubt whether contacts are even possible in Corona times. But the neighborhood help has found a good solution: it now also offers telephone sponsorships.
Sue Heine has met her senior in person a few times so far. First, the old lady sought help registering at the vaccination center. Coincidentally, Heine had just contacted the neighborhood help center because she had seen an ad looking for sponsors for the elderly. She immediately made herself useful and drove the elderly woman to the vaccination appointment. After that she visited her again in her apartment. Heine thinks it’s important to get to know each other personally before you make the call. With her and the 86-year-old, it was sympathy at first sight. With this basis, chatting on the phone was of course much easier.
The conversations are sometimes longer and sometimes shorter, depending on how it fits
Anyone who imagines this a little cramped is wrong. At least for Sue Heine, “the topics of conversation are easy to come by,” as she says. She likes to listen to her senior when she talks about her life. She comes from a farm in Lower Bavaria. “But she really wanted to leave,” she reported to Heine. She wanted to go to the city and became a nurse. She soon met her husband, who, like her, was very athletic. “They did a lot together, they were a fun-loving couple,” Heine found out. Since her parents are no longer alive, she is particularly pleased to be able to talk to a woman from her parents’ generation.
Perhaps because of her athletic nature, the old lady is still very independent and, as Heine knows, “is out and about with her walker every morning and afternoon”. She therefore schedules her spontaneous calls once a week either in the late morning or on Saturday. She then asks her how her health is, how her sugar levels are – in December the godmother was also shocked when she couldn’t get the lady on the phone, she had ended up in the clinic. And she asks if the 86-year-old needs anything. But from shopping to attending doctor’s appointments, she still does everything herself. She only organized Meals on Wheels. Sometimes they then go from the hundredth to the thousandth in the conversations and soon end up back in the childhood of the elderly woman. But sometimes it just doesn’t suit them and the conversation is rather short. Just as there are no fixed times and days, there is also no fixed call duration. Both can set this up as needed. Sue Heine also repeatedly assures the elderly woman that she can contact her if she needs anything. It hasn’t been the case before, but it sure is a comforting thought.
In spring, “when Corona is finally over,” says Heine, the two women from Unterhaching have big plans. “We’d like to go out together, have a coffee somewhere and I’d also like to take her for a drive.” The managing director of the neighborhood aid Taufkirchen would be happy if there were many more happy leisure couples like this and she hopes that the senior citizens in particular will be told that the possibility exists. Corona or not.