Dear Mrs. Bluth,
I am a Catholic woman of color from Jamaica and am employed as a nurses aide in a geriatric facility where 85% of the residents are Jewish. I read The Jewish Press to the elderly residents. It took time for me to understand the Yiddish or Hebrew words sometimes found in the various column, but I have learned to enjoy the paper.
I am writing to you because it pains me to see the residents here sitting lonely and alone for days on end without a visit from their families. They are mothers and fathers who worked long hours so that their children would have a better life than they had and now they sit discarded and unwanted. Oh, their adult children come periodically for short visits, going through the motions of concern by smoothing bed covers, making small talk, all the while watching the clock. I wonder, do these adult children think they will be young forever? Do they think that by giving me gifts of perfume or money (which I always refuse to accept) and asking me to “take good care of Mom or Pop” they are fulfilling their “obligations?” I can only give their parents physical care, small comforts and minimal emotional attention – the love they crave can only come from the children who seldom spend more than half an hour with them.
In my country there is a great respect for the elderly; they are so much wiser and see so more clearly than we. In my culture, old ones are cared for at home, attended to by family members, from the youngest to the oldest. They die in their own beds surrounded by the people they loved and who loved them. So you must understand my consternation and shock at seeing how your elderly are cast off once they become feeble with age and placed in the care of people such as myself.
I realize that life here is different, that everyone has to work and that often means placing loved ones, especially the elderly and infirm in full-care facilities. But does that also mean “out of sight, out of mind?”
Mrs. S, the sweetest of women, sits by the window every day for hours on end, waiting for her daughter to come visit. The window of her memory shuts a little more each day as the sad emptiness fills up the space that love could have saved a while longer. Mr. A, a refined gentleman who lives in his past, tells me stories about his life as a boy in pre-war Hungary, the horrors he survived during WWII and the hardships he faced coming to America. He repeats these stories over and over again while I bathe him and change his linen, and I listen as he tells me how he and his wife often ate nothing so that their children could eat and grow strong and healthy. His children come to see him occasionally, on his birthday or before a holiday, but for the most part, they are simply the photographs crowded on his nightstand that he visits with daily in his memories. He sits, waiting for the door to open and for his children to enter with smiles, hugs and laughter, like in his stories from so long ago. He waits and waits and waits.
Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Bluth. I don’t mean to imply that only the Jewish patients are neglected and forgotten. From what I have witnessed from the general populace here, and what I have heard from friends who work in other institutions, this is a practice of wide spread proportions in this country. No one understands better than I how hard it is at time to care for the elderly suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, senility and/or physical disabilities on a regular basis. I understand how painful it must be for children to have to watch parents they love, respect and look up to, slowly turn into helpless, totally dependant, child-like beings. They do not have the training that allows me to do these tasks with patience and compassion. What they do have, however, is the ability to maintain their parents’ dignity, their spark of humanity and their will to live. If you remove yourselves from them, they forget why they must continue to eat, breath and exist. They feel the loneliness of the present, of missing you, of feeling your touch, hearing your voice. They stare ahead into a vast void of emptiness, one devoid of purpose.