AN OPEN LETTER TO MIKE BRESLIN AND THE ALBANY COUNTY LEGISLATURE

Mr. Breslin, I’d like you to know my brother David. At 58, wheelchair bound, overweight and bloated
from medication and immobility, his speech and thinking often unintelligible, it might be hard to find in
this prematurely aging man, glasses askew, the well loved child with piercing dark eyes, the handsome
teen , the warrior cancer survivor that he was.

David is a resident at Albany County Nursing Home. If you walk through the community room in B unit
where he sits day in and day out you might miss him among the sea of others like him somewhat
disfigured, all disempowered , disabled by illness or old age.

Because our minds reel away from the implications of such vulnerability, such an undesirable fate,
because we defend ourselves against understandable fear by seeing those gathered as an aggregate, or a
statistic, because their own life stories are often lost even to them, these day room residents can so easily
remain anonymous and other, their fate theoretical, the breadth and depth and dimension of their
personality and lives lived obscured, the painful nature of their diminished., dependency deliberately
muted by our still vital mind’s eye. It truly hurts to take them and their fate in.

Because he is my brother, I don’t want this to happen to him. I want to tell you about David.

Born in Cohoes, a third child, David was an intense and serious little guy . He went to Catholic School and
when he was 13, wanted to leave home to become a priest. David played Little League; he loved it. He
played football for a short time in high school and in high school he discovered girls, the Beatles and his
wife. David married; he had no children. He went to work for the state. His early marriage failed; he clung
to adolescence with tenacity; he fell in love again and then he became ill.

At 27, David was diagnosed over one frantic weekend with an invasive, aggressive brain tumor. He had
emergency surgery and to the amazement of his surgeon came out talking. He also was left, left side
paralyzed and with a prognosis that said he’d be dead within the year. But David fought.

David fought with every ounce of his being. Our parents devoted themselves to his sustenance and
survival; they refurbished their house so that he could move in and yet be independent; they listened as he
painfully worked his way through the horror and angst of his fate. He did chemo; he received radiation to
the maximum dose. His endocrine system was destroyed in the process. His energy levels compromised
for life.

Determining that he needed to seek understanding, David wrote poetry, he read - philosophy and
spirituality. He fell in love with A Course in Miracles and its affirmation of the human spirit. He
continued to love music and came to know probably every line of pop lyric and music written during the
60's and 70's and everything there was to know about their composers. Music sustained him.

I have his books with meticulous underlining and linear notes; his notebooks with strength giving passages
carefully copied. David went to college- struggling semester after semester- cane in hand - to take public
transportation to his classes, finding the will to persist which had eluded him as a kid. He graduated from
Hudson Valley - radiant in a family photo standing next to our youngest brother who graduated with him;
he graduated from Empire State College with a BA in Human Services- walking with slow steady
triumphant pace across the stage to our family’s cheers. He moved into his own apartment.

But he couldn’t work, didn’t have the stamina to manage the endless challenges of simply making a life for
himself plus the daily grind of a 9 to 5 job. So David volunteered. He committed to visit nursing homes.
He took training with Community Hospice. He chatted and played games with and provided humor and
solace and a rare form of understanding to those whose lives had been compromised. Framed citations for
his persistent service gave him comfort.

And then the inevitable began to happen. David’s capacity to walk and care for himself began to diminish.
He began to fall - frequently. Where he had once been able to struggle back up, he couldn’t any longer.
Also, David’s growing weakness coincided with our parents’ demise: our father, Dave’s bulwark, died and
our mom became incapacitated . David began to make frequent visits to the Emergency Room; his tests
indicated a growing dementia. A framework for assisted home care was designed and about to be
implemented when David fell in the hospital , hit his head and did further, now clearly irreversible brain
damage.

Our family searched the region looking for a rehabilitative, nursing home framework for our brother with
the hope that he might be restored to some capacity for independence but none was to be had. I begged and
pleaded the very facility where he had volunteered for years but they were adamant. No facility wanted
David; at 54 his needs would be many, long-lasting and he was a Medicaid recipient.

And so David has come to live on B unit at the Albany County Nursing home. It was at first simply the
only place that would take him, care for him, the last resort. Gradually, however, it has become home, a
place where an impressively devoted staff works with astounding altruism, concern, patience and affection
to care for him and the numerous others whose stories are as complex and real as David’s. I wonder if you
realize how broken-hearted they are contemplating the fear and uncertainty of their clients’ fate.

I know that in a time of financial crisis, fiscal managers pour carefully and responsibly over their spread
sheets. The black and white nature of numbers, bars and graphs simplify problems and decisions and the
resultant and seemingly self evident sums may make for good political capital. But perhaps there is
another calculus needed. Perhaps the Albany County legislature and its executive need to do what David
did as he strove to understand the perplexing nature of his situation at a moment of painful crisis. He
looked to foundational wisdom and principles.

Mr. Breslin, I posit that the starting point for any socially responsible decision about the future of care for
all of our dependent brothers and sisters in Albany County has to be in the day room where you look and
truly see yourself in the least of these.