Sometimes called the long goodbye by loved ones who can do little but watch as a mother or a father or a spouse slowly loses a hold on memory and its relationships, Alzheimer’s is a pain-filled stretch of forgetting.

It has only had a name for the past 100 years, but an estimated five million Americans have the disease. Alzheimer’s accounts for about 75 percent of conditions of dementia.

Last fall, St. Anne’s Mead, the retirement home in Southfield that has Episcopal Church roots, introduced the Friendship Lounge. Under the guidance of professional trainers Erin and Chris Bonitto, who founded Gemini Consulting in Minnesota a decade ago, St. Anne’s is breaking new ground in the care of its residents with Alzheimer’s.

The Friendship Lounge has the look and approach of a Montessori classroom. Up to twice a day, tables are arranged as stations and each station has an assortment of activities. Flowers to be arranged. Beads and jewelry to be strung. Paint brushes. Dolls. Wedding albums.

One by one, residents enter the room. After they are greeted personally at the door, they move about the room until they are drawn into an individual activity or group of other residents.

“The Friendship Lounge allows them to go to whichever station might be of their particular interest so you don’t end up with an activity where several people are falling asleep,” said Rick Mehrer, executive director of St. Anne’s Mead.

Mehrer has been trained to work in the lounge. In fact, everyone at St. Anne’s—from nurses’ aides to administrators and maintenance staff—is trained to be a “butterfly” in the lounge.

Mehrer doesn’t object to the Montessori comparison, but he explains that unlike pre-school teachers, butterflies are encouraged to have a light touch. The butterfly, he says, doesn’t ask a lot of questions—that’s because the residents don’t have a lot of answers. The butterfly might just draw and redraw the resident’s attention to a specific activity, and then flutter away.

“You learn from them,” he said. “Even though they are not able to express themselves as well as they used to, they can still express what they are interested in.”

“You are dealing with folks who have significant impairment to their short-term memory,” said Erin Bonitto, “and you are dealing with tremendous impairment to language skills.” She explained the concept of the Friendship Lounge is to work around those losses.

“There are many strengths that remain long into a dementia process—many strengths,” Bonitto emphasized. “But a lot of care providers don’t know that because they can’t get past the short-term memory issues and they can’t get past the language issues. But just beyond that, ‘procedure memories’ are a strength.”

Bonitto explained that those memories are often referred to as hand memories. The motor skills of a person who used to work with flowers or jewelry are still intact long after the person has lost the ability to describe them.

So a butterfly might just place a wet paintbrush into a hand that’s been waiting years to paint again or cup a caring palm behind the head of a baby doll.

“It is bringing back memory in a different way and tapping into skills that they still retain,” said Mehrer.

The Friendship Lounge underscores the approach of trainers Erin and Chris Bonitto in the challenge of helping care-givers deal with Alzheimer’s —and why St. Anne’s Mead is eager to implement the practices.

“It’s all about moments of pleasure, moments of purpose, and moments of peace,” Bonitto said. “You hear some therapists or academics talking about ‘engagement responses’ or ‘length of attention span.’ Those things are important, but I don’t think they translate well to a nursing assistant or a nurse or a son or a daughter.

“But if I say we are trying to provide moments of pleasure, moments of purpose, and moments of peace, that clicks. Anybody can understand it—so then we can teach it.”

The impact of this approach to Alzheimer’s care is anything but momentary. Bonitto points to a number of clinical improvements in Alzheimer’s patients including fewer falls, reduced reliance on drugs, less bewilderment and longer lives.

“We simply don’t see the rapid decline when people exercise all parts of their brain. They retain their language skills longer, they seem to retain their abilities to do things for themselves longer, and they tend to eat better and sleep better,” Bonitto said.