What is an Abider?

ALLENTOWN - Nobody in Cedarbrook Nursing Home can get away from Dona Reynolds, not even the dying.

She hugs them. Sings to them. Kisses them. Prays with them.

If residents are just days, hours or minutes from death, she’ll stroke their hair, hold their hand, tell them it’s perfectly OK to head home to their Heavenly Father.

Reynolds, 73, is one of several volunteers in a new group at the nursing home known as the “Abiders.” Their role is to comfort the dying. The idea is that nobody should die alone.

Since October, when she started, Reynolds has sat with 14 people – many of whom had nobody else – as they died in their nursing home beds.

“It’s a comfort to me,” she said, “to know I’ve done something good for somebody else at the last minute, when there’s nobody else there.”

What a wonderful service, so needed. And given so freely.

Reynolds started coming to this 483-bed nursing home here two years ago, when her husband, Bob, moved in with advanced Alzheimer’s. She’s tried to bring joy to the living as well as comfort to the dying, becoming a friend and frequent visitor to scores of lonely and frail residents. More than 90 percent of Cedarbrook residents will eventually die there.

The abider role is growing around the country, but still relatively new.

A Lutheran pastor at a long-term-care facility in Wisconsin started the first Abider program in 1995. He took the name from the 24th chapter of Luke, in which two disciples, noting the hour is late, ask the resurrected Jesus to “abide with us,” and from a 19th-century hymn, written from the author’s deathbed, “Abide With Me.”

Some nursing homes and hospices have started programs by that or other names. Samaritan Hospice in South Jersey, for instance, started its version, called Vigil Volunteers, this summer.

“We are hoping for great results,” said Sally Cezo, with Samaritan volunteer services.

“One in four Americans die in a nursing home,” said Joan Teno, a Brown University professor and physician who is an expert in end-of-life care.

“Many of those people are orphan elderly – no family that’s close by. They don’t have anybody who visits. So hospice and nursing home volunteers are fulfilling an important gap that family can’t provide by being there.”

Every nursing home I have worked at indeed has these orphaned elderly. Often it is an aide who will sit with them, on their own time volunteering. I would like to see this idea grow: Abiders.