When Edyth Larsen Stewart celebrates her 100th birthday Oct. 25, Audrey Kooreman will be there to cut the cake.

Solicitously wheeling Stewart through the halls of Island Health and Rehabilitation Center, Kooreman acts like a caring daughter, but the close relationship is not familial.

It is a family-style bond that has grown from a casual friendship begun decades ago, in 1974. That connection strengthened as Stewart aged, until Kooreman and her husband, Bill, became Stewart’s caregivers.

“Is it OK if I lie and tell them you’re my mother?” Kooreman playfully asks Stewart, as she sets the wheelchair brakes. “She tells me I’m the daughter she wishes she had.”

Stewart has outlived all her eight siblings. She has grandsons in Ollala and Port Orchard and four great-grandchildren, but her surviving son lives out of state.

Kooreman notes that, despite not having the blood tie, she and her husband have enjoyed Stewart’s mothering.

“She’s been very warm and loving,” Kooreman said. “She’s nurtured us well.”

Kooreman and Stewart met when both sang in Rolling Bay Presbyterian Church choir. It would have been hard to overlook the outgoing Stewart, who made a practice of smuggling her poodle into rehearsals, hidden in a knitting bag.

Stewart became the Kooreman’s dog-sitter and the friends came to know each other through seasons of performance.

There were shopping trips and dinners shared.

In 1993, Stewart invited Kooreman to accompany her to a monthly meeting of a sewing and knitting club – a group Kooreman joined, although she pursued neither craft.

“So then we were the ‘sewing, knitting and watching’ club,” Kooreman said.

Stewart did volunteer work for Rolling Bay Presbyterian Church until her eyesight deteriorated.

“We’d been helping her with little odds and ends,” Kooreman said. “When she quit driving we’d drive her. We sort of slid into the caretaker role.”

Storied history

Kooreman has also become custodian of Stewart’s personal history.

After years of listening to her stories, Kooreman has assumed the role of personal archivist, telling the tales that Stewart can no longer communicate.

Born into a family of 12 children of Danish heritage in Saskatchewan in 1903, Stewart experienced frontier life as a young child.

Stewart’s father drove cattle, and her mother would bring him lunch, transporting food and children in the horse and buggy.

When Stewart was still an infant, she fell under the wagon wheels when the young horse got spooked and reared.

Her mother, Stewart told Kooreman, retrieved her and, whipping off her apron, flagged down a band of Native Americans in the distance.

The natives took the baby back to their tribe and treated her with herbs and ointments.

“They saved her life,” Kooreman said, “but they couldn’t save her eye.”

The “wandering eye” would be a permanent reminder of the narrowly averted tragedy.

The Larsen family moved to Tacoma; after her mother’s early death, the young Stewart was raised by an older sister.

While their father forbade most pleasures, Stewart told Kooreman, his large brood found ways to bend the rules. When her father built a two-story playhouse, the boys commandeered the upper story for illicit perusal of comic books, while cut-up Christmas cards were re-configured into a deck of playing cards.

Stewart left high school without graduating and married Albert Stewart, whose job at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard brought her to West Sound.

“I don’t know exactly when she married,” Kooreman said, “but I know it was around 1923. I know he built her a one-story brick house in Bremerton in 1942.”

After her husband died in 1963, Stewart moved to Bainbridge, living for 23 years in Madrone Trailer Park, before moving to Finch Place.

Although she never attended college, Stewart was well-read, Kooreman says, and well-travelled.

“She was up on her history and geography,” Kooreman said. “She was a very remarkable woman.”

According to Island Health and Rehabilitation social worker Mary Render, a non-family relationship like the one that the Kooremans have with Stewart is rare.

“I’ve worked in the field for six years,” Render said, “and while I can’t say I’ve never seen it, it is unusual. Normally it’s a family member who’s involved.”

All the seniors currently at IHR have at least one advocate, Render says, and

BI Senior Center Director Barbara McGilvray also finds it hard to think of an island senior who lacks a caregiver.

“Very rarely do you see someone who has nobody,” she said. “I think one of the unique things about the island is that we are still enough of a community so that people do keep their eyes out for each other.”

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The Kooremans are just one island family that supports seniors on the island, says senior center director Barbara McGilvray.

As an example, McGilvray points to the practice of islanders visiting seniors during extended hospitalizations.

“Folks just show up and do it – they don’t call it volunteering,” she said.

But despite evidence of support here, McGilvray says she worries about the senior who is so isolated that he or she may not be identified.

“There’s always that fear,” she said.

Sue Wells, director of Interfaith Volunteer Caregivers, the island nonprofit founded in 1997 to help seniors with tasks ranging from grocery shopping to home visits, says that about one-third of the 120 seniors the group currently helps could use more help with transportation to doctor appointments in Seattle.

“That is one need,” Wells said, “and it’s not one IVC cannot completely fill.”

Most seniors that IVC helps are still living at home, Wells says.

The job of caring for seniors is a big one, whether parents move in with adult children or into assisted living, McGilvray emphasizes.

The commitment means being on call 24/7.

“I wish I had a nickel for every family member who’s shocked when they first become a caregiver,” she said.

“It’s not necessarily what they signed on for.”