2022-100-Faces-Book - Flipbook - Page 10
Rita
Go-getter. Listener. Presbyterian.
Rita is legally blind. Years ago, she lost her vision and
the ability to drive.
“You can feel very isolated once you can’t get in that
car and go any time you want,” Rita says.
children. But her husband passed away unexpectedly
when her youngest daughter was in high school. Rita
was a widow at age 43, so she enrolled in Motlow
State Community College and became a secretary to
maintain her family’s independence.
Rita has many friends but lives alone in a small, quiet
community for adults ages 55 and up. Her daughters
are nearby, and she’s grateful for their support.
Thanks to Senior Ride Nashville, she still maintains
that independence even though she can no
longer drive.
“But you just can’t call on family and neighbors that
often and interrupt their lives to get you where you
need to go.”
“Rita is fully capable; she’s just lacking the ability to
drive,” says Elizabeth Madsen, a program manager at
Senior Ride Nashville. “She wants to continue her life
as she did before her diagnosis. She wants to stay
involved, to see her friends and family and to get to
those doctor’s appointments. She’s using Senior Ride
Nashville to make that happen.”
After her diagnosis, Rita suffered from a pinched nerve
in her leg, and treatment was important. But without
the ability to drive, getting to doctors’ appointments
was tough. A neighbor who volunteers for FiftyForward
recommended Senior Ride Nashville, a United Way
partner agency that calls on volunteers to assist older
adults who can no longer drive themselves. Rita was
accepted into the program and for the first couple
months she used Senior Ride Nashville twice a week to
get to her doctors’ appointments.
“I don’t know what I would have done without them.
I really don’t. It’s been a godsend to call them for
help. I’ve met some wonderful people. To have
the opportunity to get to the doctor, grocery store,
pharmacist … shopping even. I recently had a young
lady take me shopping and was able to tell me if what I
had on looked decent enough for an old lady,” she says,
smiling. “It’s helped me so much in many ways.”
Rita says loneliness can be one of the biggest
problems that seniors face.
“Without the ability to be independent and move
around the way you’d like to—the way you always
have—it can lead to depression in many people.”
Reduced mobility often isolates seniors and prevents
them from accessing nutrition and health care. Adults
typically live six to 10 years after they stop driving,
Elizabeth says.
“We find the biggest desire for seniors is affordable,
reliable transportation. You would think with the
plethora of rideshares in the community that everyone
is using these services. But, if you are relying on that
kind of service to get to your appointments on a day-today or week-to-week basis, it gets expensive
really quickly.”
Elizabeth projected that a quarter of Tennesseans
would be designated as seniors by 2020. This portion
of the population is rapidly growing, which means the
need for more reliable transportation among elders
is increasing.
“If there were more drivers, perhaps more riders can
be accommodated,” Rita says. “For people to give
up some of their spare time to volunteer to help the
seniors in our neighborhood is a wonderful asset.”
And she’s no stranger to isolation. In 1955, she and
her husband moved to Tennessee to raise their
Senior Ride Nashville
