You'll Never Walk Alone, The Thin Edge of Dignity

You'll Never Walk Alone, by Dick Weinman, The Thin Edge of Dignity

The uplifting melody and inspirational lyric of You’ll Never Walk Alone, have made the Rodgers and Hammerstein song a hymn-like source of hope for millions of people around the world - even for the Liverpool football team. It’s their team song.

The song’s title also has special meaning for me. At eighty-two, I’m on the final journey of my life. Disabled, I’m in need of a caring hand to grasp as I travel this path. Living in a Long Term Care, (LTC) facility, the hand may be available, but not ready to grip. My journey – the quality of my remaining years – is in the hands of a caregiver

A person lives in an Assisted Living Facility because s/he can’t or don’t want to do things for – or their children don’t want them to. One lives in a Nursing Home because s/he is fragile or disabled and helpless. One lives in a Memory Care Center because s/he can’t remember, or think or walk or talk or eat and drink.

Despite the helplessness, I think the desire of elders in Long Term Care, facilities is to retain their sense of dignity, purpose, and value as an individual person.

How can the desire for meaning and meaningfulness materialize? It needs to inhere in the attitude of the owners and administrators of the Long Term Care, facility. They are the Providers who enable purposeful, supportive living. They are the force that allows me to value me. They lead those who assist the handicapped, enable the disabled, and think for the non-cognitive. A Provider deploys the caregivers who execute the spirit of the Provider.

The caregivers are the front line of contact with those who need care. However temporary the relationship, their lives conjoin with those elders. We residents of LTC facilities have been loaned to the caregivers to provide the care that ensures the quality of our final years.

Some responsibility! Is the Caregiver aware of this transcendental obligation?

If you’re a caregiver, you don’t just insert a hearing aid for a hearing-deprived resident, you don’t just give a shower to a manually disabled resident, you don’t just wipe a totally dependent resident. In short, you do more than assist a resident perform the Activities of Daily Living: you become the human bridge that carries a trace of dignity to the helpless; that empathizes with their inability and uncertainty.

But building the bridge of empathy is not the caregiver’s job alone. This obligation belongs to the owners, administrators, and managers of Long Term Care, facilities. They conceive the vision, design the structure, create the processes for operating the ALF, Nursing Home, or Memory Center which will enable the old, the fragile, the disabled – to write their own narratives: their stories of closing out their lives.

What I’ve articulated are abstract concepts. The practical comes down to these questions about a caregiver: Who is she/he? Who should she/he be? Why does she/he choose to be a caregiver? How should she/he practice caregiving?

The answers begin with hiring. Wanted: a caring person, committed to the welfare of elders-in-need, who will treat her/him with dignity, respect, and compassion.

Is that the behavior of some caregivers who I have observed: who, after a year of serving a resident, don’t know his drink preference; or the caregiver who still can’t differentiate between two residents whose names begin with the same sound; or the day-after-day perfunctory manner of giving assistance? And I depend on that care!

In my time in as a resident in assisted living, I have found - oddly enough - that the kindness and respect which a caregiver should exhibit, is shown by the housekeepers. Currently, the housekeepers where I live are both mature women, grandmothers, in their early fifties. Perhaps, the closeness to residents’ ages resonates.

The caregivers who I value are also mature, but younger than the housekeepers - mothers, not grand, in their late forties. Interestingly, these women are not ethnically Western. Their cultures are Hispanic and Filipina. A recent caring and respectful employee was from Sri Lanka. Two young African men, one a father, are also respectful and caring caregivers.

The non-western caregivers, of all generational groups, had been acculturated to respect and care for elders.

But this respect for elders is not cultural, alone. Some American, college students have exhibited empathy with residents, even friendships. In my case, contrary to the administrative stricture prohibiting caregivers from forming friendships, mine have continued over the years.

Traits common among these millennials include being close to their grandparents, hoping to enter the health care profession, and being serious about school.

A young man in his late twenties, who was a caregiver and med-aid at my ALF for three years, left here to take a more advanced position in a home for developmentally disabled adults. After working there for two years, he is about to start a home for developmentally disabled children.

Another former caregiver, with whom I was a friend when she worked in my ALF, has now become a “friend” on Facebook . She has been a case worker in Washington State. When I was invited to a conference in Seattle, she responded to my request, and became my caregiver for the two days of the event

Furthermore, even when these two young people were students at the university near my ALF and caregivers here, they volunteered their time to help me, so I could attend an all day event on the University campus. They took the time between classes to alternate helping toilet me in the morning and in the afternoon.

Another example that bonds between caregivers and residents can be formed and sustained concerns two other former caregiver friends from this ALF who, after college graduation, had gone to teach English in Spain. We communicated on Facebook during the two years they had been away. Both agreed to be my flight caregiver when I planned a trip to Spain. That’s caregiver connectivity. More than assisting in performing an ADL.

Perhaps the best example of the empathetic qualities of caregiving occurred when my wife, Ginny, was a resident in an Alzheimer’s facility. The caregivers who greeted my wife when she entered the facility in 2005 were the same ones who were at her death in 2013. And over the years as I visited, they greeted me by my first name. Once, as I sought to feed Ginny, her caregiver asked if I minded if she could. She said she knew Ginny’s eating weaknesses as she had been her caregiver for all those years of her residency.

My wife’s caregivers did more than feed her. They became part of her life.

Dare I say caregiving has a spiritual side as well as a physical? At least, caregiving may be something more than merely material.

I think a caregiver is a person who journeys with me along the path of my remaining days. The caregiver can be one of my children, and I can live in their home. But, if I live in an institution of Long Term Care, I tread the last years of my life with a stranger by my side. I do not walk alone.