Glenys Carl

I came to America as an immigrant with three little boys in 1968, and I worked for Head Start – a new program at the time for early childhood. It was in Detroit, where poverty was rampant – there had been huge riots there – and I believed that people of all walks of life should come together in times of adversity to help.

When my children were old enough to leave home and attend college.  The youngest, Scott, went to Australia. After only five weeks, he was disturbed by a burglar, who pushed him, so that he fell and hurt his head, and was taken to hospital in a coma.

I immediately flew out to be with him, and lived in the hospital until he had regained consciousness and was well enough to be discharged. After that, I cared for him in Sydney and – because he was largely disabled – I had to find help from the start.

I found volunteers, mostly in the street; and gradually a whole community of wonderful people started helping me – bathing Scott, taking him for walks in his wheelchair, and especially assisting with his exercises, hopefully to get him walking again. That’s when I realized how people love to come together with a purpose and feel needed.

We nursed Scott for four years, during which I became aware of the terrible shortage of home care. The cost of home care is prohibitive for most people, even those with health insurance, so people with disabilities or chronic illness, or who are at the end of their lives, are mostly left in the care of relatives. And relatives are quickly overwhelmed. My intuitive approach – gathering and training volunteers – seemed to be a solution.
Scott died at the age of 25. This inspired me to write a book about our experience. Hold My Hand was published by Macmillan and, to my surprise, it was great success, translated into six languages.

After that, I threw myself into caring for AIDS patients during the early years of the epidemic, and this awakened an even deeper purpose in me. I decided to create an organization of community volunteers, and nursing and medical students, to provide free home care to people in need.

This was Coming Home Connection in New Mexico, and it marked the real beginning of my encore career. I was 63! We worked with all kinds of people, especially war veterans. Seeing how vets come home disabled, or unable to find work, we started training them in physical therapy, so they could help their comrades, feel needed and create jobs for themselves. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gave us a generous grant, and that helped a lot!

My latest dream is to create a hospice and respite house, because there is no free-standing hospice house in Santa Fe. And I will do it – because I’ve found my passion, and the courage to speak out about what is needed!

It is always better to try and do something, rather than nothing.

(Glenys Carl was honored as an Encore.org Purpose Prize Fellow in 2013.)