Recently, I was interviewed by Cindy Sutter of the Boulder Daily Camera. I want to share with you the following article, published on April 29, 2009.
The Reassurance of Touch
Mary Rose found her calling as a student at the then Boulder School of Massage Therapy. She did an internship at a nursing home in 1984, when massage was a less common practice in health settings.
One day, she sat down beside a woman in the common room, took her hand and began gently massaging it. “She started to massage back,” Rose says. “She looked up. She didn’t say anything. After just a few minutes, I said, ‘Thank you,’ put her hand back in her lap and left.”
Returning to the room an hour later, Rose noticed a change in the woman’s demeanor. “I saw she was engaged,” Rose says. “It struck me, the difference between her original dejected look. Now she was open, looking around. That left a very strong impression on me.”
After Rose began her practice, the experience at the nursing home stayed with her. In 1989, she became involved in hospice care, working as a volunteer initially and then to train other massage therapists. She has now written a textbook called “Comfort Touch: Massage for the Elderly and the Ill” published by Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins.
The technique uses gentle, but firm pressure, what Rose calls “the feeling of a hug,” and avoids rubbing, which can tear the thin skin of an older person. Comfort Touch does not require lotion, a special massage table or a set amount of time. Instead, Rose says, the philosophy is to offer comfort where the person is, physically and emotionally.
“You go to where the client is and help them to get more comfortable,” she says. The idea is not to cure something that’s wrong, but rather to offer a deeply felt comfort. “When someone is to that point in hospice care, you’re really touching their whole life,” Rose says. “It’s all there in the nervous system. All of who they are is there.”
Clyde Rae Jolie-Ashe remembers how much Rose helped her husband, Steven Ashe when he was dying of pancreatic cancer at age 52. “He was in a lot of pain,” Jolie-Ashe says. As if that weren’t enough, the cancer caused changes in her husband’s brain chemicals that caused him distress.
“He had always been a cheerful and buoyant person,” she says. “That troubled him, the changing of his thinking and being.” Although doctors prescribed anti-anxiety and anti-depressant medication, Jolie-Ashe says the massage seemed to work the best.
“It was my sense that the work he did with Mary Rose was as effective as anything,” she says. “He would beam when he saw her coming and was very peaceful for some time after she’d been there. He was able to organize his thoughts.”
Jolie-Ashe says her husband, who enjoyed painting, was able to complete 20 pieces in his last six months of life. “I think it was the technique she used,” Jolie-Ashe says. “It helps people to settle into what is. It’s not trying to fix anything. What it does is create a sense of acceptance.”
Autumn Zegel, director of acute care services at Hospice Care of Boulder and Broomfield Counties, says many people come to hospice after months or years of fighting cancer of other illnesses.
“It’s just a beautiful way to be with someone,” Zegel says of the Comfort Touch technique. “It’s a beautiful way to not stir things up in their bodies.”
Rose also says it’s important for the therapist to be aware of her breath and to be centered in the experience. That helps the client to relax, as well.
“People are open and vulnerable. They have come to this point in their life. This is all there is,” Rose says. “It’s life, and it’s feeling in the present moment. It’s quite a privilege to be there.”
The book, Comfort Touch: Massage for the Elderly and the Ill, by Mary Kathleen Rose, is available at www.comforttouch.com. For information about trainings in Comfort Touch call 303-651-9375.
