Every week, I volunteered at a care home and spent time with Ruth, an 84-year-old woman with advanced dementia who always called me \u201cClaire\u201d and spoke about our memories together. When I corrected her, the staff told me to play along, so I did. Six months later, Ruth passed away, and at her funeral, her son showed me an old photograph of a young woman named Claire. She had the same blonde hair and smile as me. He explained that Claire was his sister, who died in a car accident at just 19\u2014the exact age I was. His mother had never recovered from losing her daughter, and seeing me had allowed her to believe Claire had somehow returned. I stood there fighting back tears, realizing that without knowing it, I had become a source of comfort for a grieving mother who thought I was the daughter she had lost. \ud83d\udc94<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every week, I volunteered at a care home and spent time with Ruth, an 84-year-old woman with advanced dementia who always called me \u201cClaire\u201d and spoke about… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24756,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24757,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24755\/revisions\/24757"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ourtimenew.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}