Edward Craft Creates Community in Memory Care

Edward Craft (he/him) is an activity director at The Landing at Augusta Woods in Spring, Texas. The Landing offers retirement cottages for active adults over 55 years old. What makes the Landing unique is its specialization in memory care for residents with dementia-related illnesses or Alzheimer’s. Craft was introduced to senior living communities as a teenager, following pressure from his father to play the saxophone and perform from one community to the next. The pressure would affect his perspective on older people, having thought they smell and are weird. That is, until one experience right after a teenage Craft performed with the church choir propelled his passion for senior care. “There was a lady after I played Jingle Bells. She looked me in the eye and dropped the F-bomb, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I pulled her aside, and we just exchanged all of the bad words that I knew at the time. And as we were leaving, the staff there told us that she has Alzheimer’s, and this is the most they’d ever seen her verbalize in the year she’d been there,” Craft recalls.

Since then, Craft has led a 23-year-long career in senior care, going from volunteer work to becoming an assistant activity director and eventually his current full-time position at The Landing. Craft recalls ways queerness has appeared within the lives of his residents through the heartbreakingly moving story of Betty and Cindy, two women whose deep, decades-long bond was scorned by both of their families back in 2014. “Marriage equality wasn’t a thing, so [Cindy’s] family had the power of attorney. They wouldn’t let Betty come and visit her own wife. A really profound moment was when Cindy came out to me as a lesbian, and I came out to her as well. It was more touching than I thought because I thought I needed that. It turned out she needed it more than I did. I can only imagine what she was going through on top of having dementia, so we would just come out to each other every other day because she would forget.”

Craft constantly makes efforts to welcome queer and cultural identities with his presence and his creativity as an activity director. A testament to Craft’s craftiness is the creation of “Asian Powwow,” where every Friday, he brings in food from different Asian cultures and enjoys them with the Asian residents while sitting on the floor of one of their apartments. Craft’s background as a second-generation Filipino American cultivates another layer of connection with his Asian residents, even if many, amusingly, assume he shares their own specific Asian identity.

Nevertheless, Craft embraces these labels and even goes so far as to research the culture he is mistakenly thought to be from. “At my current workplace, we partnered with our Asian residents to bring more traditional cultures. We have one resident who is Chinese Mexican…she has a really great twist on tamales. Next month, she is going to be teaching us how to make eggrolls and tamales. We also have a great group of Filipino team members, and every year we dress up in our traditional garb, and we make lumpia with our older Filipino residents. It’s great to hear them say ‘oh yeah, I remember doing this with my own family.’”

Creating spaces to embrace identity is pivotal in Craft’s work, as he emphasizes the importance of human connection. The reality of aging is one that our society unfortunately looks down on, and connecting with older folks is still a work in progress. A current concern for Craft is the evolution of technology and social media, and their effects on younger generations, which eventually influence how they interact with older people. As a member of that younger generation, Craft finds it much easier to connect with older individuals than what is sometimes assumed, and simply being oneself and finding the capacity to empathize goes a long way. Being a gay man who grew up in a heavily religious household, he relates to the feelings of isolation that persist among his patients. Some time ago, he and his residents faced a difficult period in which isolation became a cause of immense unhappiness among his residents.

Memory care has become a deep passion for Craft, and there are many striking experiences that come with taking care of individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s, especially in the midst of a pandemic, when the world was in a collective state of confusion and fear. “We had to contain everyone in their apartment. That’s super difficult when you add dementia to that because they don’t understand why they’re being isolated in their room and being kept there. That was super stressful and hard. Keep in mind that we had to wear PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). The residents didn’t even understand who we were because we were masked up and had goggles on.”

Early on in his career, Craft found authenticity to be the key to creating connections. What older individuals gravitate to, especially when dealing with illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, are human beings with experiences.

“We just have to be authentic. And we have to be vulnerable. This is the last chapter of their lives, and so the fact that we can really connect with them and hold them up and support them through this journey is super important.”

Keep up with Edward Craft  on Instagram @edward.esguerra.