Mendham Siblings Start Remote Reading Program For Senior Citizens

MENDHAM, NJ — Two Mendham teens found a way to connect with senior citizens who have been isolated because of COVID, through a special reading program they developed.

It all began when Gabriella Ager, 16, a junior at West Morris Mendham High School and her brother Eli, 13, an eighth grader at Mountain View Middle School, came up with the idea to connect virtually with senior citizens in the pandemic.

It was how “Bringing Stories to Seniors” came to life, a few of her friends also volunteering to read.

“I’m a chiropractor in Denville and was able to work through the pandemic,” their mother Danielle Ager wrote to Patch. “I was amazed how seniors were scared to leave their houses and how they had very little computer and technical skills.”

Ager said when her children came to her with the idea, she was very proud of them for thinking of and executing it.

“We saw that visitation was limited and aimed to seek a way for seniors to connect with the community through reading over the telephone,” Gabriella Ager wrote on her website about the Bringing Stories To Seniors program.

“We understand that some baby boomers are not technologically savvy and may have a difficult time using smartphones, tablets, or online ordering tools,” she continued.

Ager began reading to a senior citizen that she and her brother were both very acquainted with, their grandmother Judith Ager.

“This was a way for us to connect during COVID,” Gabriella Ager wrote, with reading a bond she and her grandmother share, "and I began to realize that I could apply this to other seniors who couldn’t read themselves or didn’t have smartphones.”

Since the brother and sister team have started their reading program, they read to seven senior citizens by phone throughout the region, she told Patch.

Some live in their homes and others live in the Fox Hill Condominiums in Rockaway.

“We read short stories,” she said.

Three of the seniors they read to have dementia or Alzheimer’s and one is in a wheelchair.

“Sometimes,” Ager added, “I have to reintroduce myself every week if they don’t remember.”

“I ask them if they have any requests,” Ager explained, with two recent ones Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber another.

Ager said the Chabad she volunteers with reached out to Brightview Nursing Home in Randolph on their behalf; and their mother said another nursing home in Pennsylvania just contacted them with interest in their program.

One of the ways she and her brother also help, Ager said, is with a delivery service, where they drop off books to local seniors from the Mendham Borough Library.

“We are always looking for more volunteers and more seniors who we can provide our services to who want it,” she said.

Would you like to volunteer to read to seniors over the phone; or ask that one of the Bringing Stories To Seniors volunteers read to a senior citizen in your life?

Contact gabbychessie23@gmail.com for more information or visit her website https://bringingstoriestoseniors.godaddysites.com.

Questions or comments about this story? Have a news tip? Contact me at: jennifer.miller@patch.com.