http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1998-06/04/061l-060498-idx.
html
Seniors Stay Busy Lending A Helping Hand
County Honors 5 Volunteers With Achievement Awards
By Elissa Leibowitz
Special to The Washington Post, June 4, 1998
The stereotype of retirees is often of bored and restless seniors
struggling to fill the gap once occupied by family and jobs.
Not so for five Montgomery County senior citizens: DONNA DORROS,
Charles Pritchard, Vernetta Reynolds, Murray Stein and Bill Tait. All
are active volunteers who have been honored by county officials for
their zest and contributions to various community activities. Each has
been awarded the newly created Path of Achievement Award.
Advocacy Award
Five years after her husband Sidney's death, people still ask Donna
Dorros why she married a man who suffered from Parkinson's disease so
advanced that he often sat rigid and immobile in a chair, unable to talk
or move.
"My answer is always the same: You don't marry a disease, you marry a
person," said Dorros, 70. "The Parkinson's was incidental. The 11 1/2
years that we were married were probably the most rewarding years of my
life."
Dorros and her husband met when the two worked together at the National
Education Association. Sidney already had been diagnosed with the
disease, at age 36, when Donna Dorros met him. After the two married
in 1982, they started a weekly support group for Parkinson's patients
that Dorros still runs every Wednesday morning at Covenant United
Methodist Church in Montgomery Village.
Dorros scans the Internet daily for new information on the disease that
she can share with the group's 30 members. And after attending church
every Sunday, she rides the bus to the Asbury Methodist Village's Wilson
Health Care Center to visit former group members whose diseases have
advanced considerably.
"When you don't have anything you have to do every day," she said, "it's
really important to fill in the spaces with things that are really
important and make a difference in life."<snip>...
--
Judith Richards, London, Ontario, Canada
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