Spreading joy – the magic pill to overcoming life’s tragedies
After losing her closest family to cancer and dementia, Elisa Lee suddenly found a new zest for life by performing tricks and clowning on stage
There are few things more heart-wrenching than losing family. One of those things is to have to watch them suffer first.
Elisa Lee Wai-ching, 62, experienced it multiple times in the span of a few years.
Both her brothers died from stomach cancer; the older one first, then the younger one, whom she’d worked hard for all her life to put through engineering school. And all the while she was dealing with terminally ill brothers, her mother’s dementia was getting worse.
That was about two decades ago now, but Lee still can’t forget the moment her baby brother lay on the sofa, with barely enough energy to lift his arm, looking gaunt and jaundiced, helping wipe their elderly mother’s face and arms one last time. Lee chokes up. “She didn’t even know who he was.”
After her younger brother died, she cared for her mother as her health declined, until she also passed away.
It was too much to bear for Lee. She broke down and her thyroid problems flared up. Her doctor told her she needed to figure out a way to relieve the burden on her chest. One recommendation was to volunteer.
Lee had in fact already been volunteering for years, but the services she offered would leave her rather glum. “Especially when I helped take senior citizens on outings, pushing their wheelchairs just made me think of my own mother, how I wished it could be her I was pushing.”
So she signed up with different NGOs, forcing herself to try new things. Through a group that took senior citizens hiking, she met volunteer entertainer William Lau.
Lau, a magician, needed an assistant to help perform tricks for his audience, who are mostly elderly people.
We could just do a simple trick: here’s a handkerchief, and now, watch – flowers! The old folks would all clap their hands excitedly, genuinely wowed
Lee, a former champion ballroom dancer, had just the right amount of theatricality to add to Lau’s magic shows. The two became performance partners, teaching themselves new tricks and clowning and balloon twisting.
It changed her life. “We could just do a simple trick: here’s a handkerchief, and now, watch – flowers! The old folks would all clap their hands excitedly, genuinely wowed. It makes me feel so great that such a small thing can make them so happy.”
Having seen her mother’s brain functions fade away, Lee really sees the importance in keeping the mind active. She says magic is great for that, because it piques the audience’s interest enough that they would try and figure out how it was done.
“It also gets the old folk out of their homes to come to watch our act. It’s exercise for the body and the brain,” Lee says, comforted.
Lee and her partner now even hold classes to teach the elderly and mentally disabled to perform, spreading the fun as their audience learn to entertain others too.
Her father had also died of stomach cancer when she was young, and the disease weighs on her like a ticking time bomb. She’s able to make light of it, often joking with people: “I have two choices to my end: stomach cancer or dementia.”
This kind of positive mindset took years, but she is now full of hope: whatever her end may be, the path along the way will be a continuous cycle of joy, between her bringing it to people and gaining it from seeing others rejoice.
