The venerable, 85 year old Senior Peer Counselor put it best, “These people are a gift.” I learned so much from the unmarried couple in their 70’s with whom I stayed in Oakmont for the past eight months.

• I enjoyed being surrounded by beautiful objects and expensive books that I did not have to dust.
• I learned what it felt like to be on the receiving end of verbal abuse.
• I saw what “scab-picking” was.
• In dismay, I watched the man flee into a financial fantasy to shield himself, emotionally, from the verbal abuse. For 10 years he had been sending money to a Nigerian “lawyer” in the hope of getting a bank in Abu Dhabi to lend him a million dollars to invest in real estate. Just before I left today, he told me the Nigerian lawyer had been jailed, which froze the man’s assets in Nigeria during November and December, and that he had fired the Nigerian. He continues to believe that his loan will fund “next week.”
• I watched the hostess punish me by keeping the TV tuned to Fox News.
• I learned that isolation is the enemy of mental health.
• I saw that Learned Helplessness keeps people trapped in ruts of thin emotional survivorship. They mistake this for courage.
• What takes real courage is climbing out of the helplessness that was learned when one was vulnerable, sharpening the tools that have been gained over the years, learning to trust yourself again, and doing what it takes to get out of the rut.
• I learned why the work we do as Senior Peer Counselors is so important.
• I learned that love is simultaneously fragile and indestructible.
• I learned that a dog is a fountain of joy and unconditional love. I won’t be paraphrasing D.C Fontana anymore about “enslaving animals for the emotional gratification of humans.”

Their beautiful Golden Retriever suddenly became lame before Thanksgiving and had to be euthanized before Christmas. The house was not the same without her. The Feeling of Healing was gone. A grayness descended.

I left.