A healing touch

Auburndale man uses hugs, kisses to cope, help bring his wife back from the grip of Alzheimer's

Sol Rogers cuddled up with his wife, Rita, during a recent afternoon at Briarwood Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Needham. (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

Every day, Sol Rogers asks the aides to make room for him on his wife's bed. He removes his glasses and puts them on the table next to the door. Slowly, he takes off his shoes and swings his 89-year-old frame onto the tiny twin hospital bed.

He cuddles up to Rita -- his wife of 61 years -- wraps his thin leg over hers, and squeezes her shoulder. He presses his face into hers and kisses her.

"I love you, Rita, I love you," he says. "Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"I love you more."

"No...," says Rita, 85, her voice slurred by advanced Alzheimer's disease.

He laughs.

Sol, of Auburndale, spends about three hours a day at the Briarwood Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Needham, singing Rita old songs, taking her out to the garden, or simply lying in bed with her, telling her how much he cares.

There is not much scientific evidence to support touch therapy for Alzheimer's patients, but it has clearly improved Rita's behavior - she's calmer now, communicates better, and has regained some mobility. And it's boosted Sol's ability to cope with her decline.

"We all need touch; we all deserve some kind of intimacy. And there is all kinds of research out there that the body and mind respond to touch in very positive ways," said Dr. Robert Stern, co-director of Boston University's Alzheimer's Disease Clinical and Research Program. "Whether it will actually have an impact on the progression of this degenerative disease is very unlikely, but providing someone with a connection . . . can only be positive for both."

Rita's agitated behavior may be improving because Sol's touch is decreasing her levels of cortisol - a stress-related hormone, said Lynn Woods, an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Nursing.

"Holding his wife . . . her old memory would remember his presence, because that's not affected in Alzheimer's," said Woods, who has published two papers on the effects of therapeutic touch on patients with dementia. "So it would be comforting to her and decrease her stress and anxiety, and hopefully her agitation."

When Rita first got to Briarwood five months ago, she could barely move her legs or arms. Seven years since she began showing signs of the disease, she was irritable and agitated; she screamed and yelled instead of talking.

Worse, she didn't even recognize Sol.

"I was so depressed from it that I was shaking all over and I thought I was about to have a nervous breakdown," he said.

He would call his son, Ron, six times a day because he was lonely and depressed. Ron, 58, a financial services professional, said people would ask him how his mother was doing: "I said, 'It's not so much my mother; it's my dad.' "

Then, Sol had an idea - he says it must have come from God.

"I got in bed with her and loved her up and I got rid of all my depression," he said.

Now, he's preaching the gospel of hugging, though none of the spouses he's told at Briarwood has yet taken his advice.

"I would like to press everybody - if they have a spouse in a nursing home, a hospital or rehabilitation center - to try to get into bed with them," Sol said. "And if you have another person in the room, don't feel bashful - that's why they have curtains."

Faith Higgins, Rita's primary aide, is convinced that Sol has been Rita's salvation (though he gives Higgins some of the credit).

"Whatever he did, he did something good," Higgins said. "She couldn't move at one point, and now she gets up looking for him - every guy that passes by, she says 'Sol!' "

While Higgins said she didn't think twice about clearing a place for Sol in Rita's bed, many nursing homes don't allow it, said Paul Raia, head of patient care and family support for the Alzheimer's Association of Massachusetts/New Hampshire.

"What we should be doing, and what not enough places are doing, is to encourage family members to do what Sol is doing - to have physical contact," Raia said.

Back in Rita's room on a recent afternoon, Sol locked his fingers in Rita's, between their frail bodies. Her left hand shook, and she wore a distant smile - not quite as firm as the one in the faded black-and-white pictures on the bedside table - but a smile nonetheless.

Sol knows his efforts will not ultimately save the woman he loves.

"She's got advanced Alzheimer's, I know she's not going to recover from that," he said.

"But while she's with me, I want to enjoy every minute of it."