An Open Letter to Nursing Home Staff

“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

To you, the one giving of yourself emotionally and physically to care for those who can no longer stay home – I see you, I thank you, and I love you for what you do.

To you, the one who will be dressing and feeding and comforting my Grandma day and night – Please see her. Please know her. Please love her for the amazing person that hides behind her illness.

I write this to you partly as a plea in my own heart to trust. To trust the place she will now call home, to trust the care that she will now depend on outside of my own, and to trust you – the one she will grow to love and need and see everyday. The one who will become family not only to her but to us in so very many ways.

I write this to you partly as a hope in my own heart to have faith. Faith that the timing is right, faith for the way in which she will be supported and cared for, and faith that the trust being placed in the people she now depends on will be a blessing instead of heartache.

I write this to you partly as a dream in my own heart to still believe in the magic of fairy tales and pixie dust. My Grandma has always had one of the strongest faiths i have ever known, she trusted her faith and the decisions based upon it with her whole self and she survived the hard times with laughter, imagination, and childlike magic. She had her own kind of pixie dust in the hardest of times and I need to believe she will carry that with her to her new home.

Dear Nurse, Dear CNA, Dear staff…

Please hear me in my plea to remember who she is. Don’t let the trials of the day make you forget that she is there, she sees you, she hears you, and she knows how she is being treated.

I say this to you, because I know – I know this work and I know the heaviness that falls upon it sometimes.

I know just how mixed up the bureaucracy behind staffing and paying and leave can be.

I know how deeply unappreciated you can feel and how truly hard you work.

I know how long the days can get and how badly some days you just won’t want to be there at all.

I know how poorly you will be treated by family members who can’t seem to figure out how to grieve in a peaceful way or even sometimes by people who are simply unkind.

I know how constant the learning curve is in the world of dementia and Alzheimer’s, finding new ways to approach, relate, comfort and protect those in your care minute by minute.

I know how understaffed you will always be and how overwhelming that can feel.

I know how little you are paid and how much that can impact your sense of worth.

I know how hard you work to show dignity, compassion, and love even to those who make it very very difficult at times.

I know the combative nature of those you care for and the heartache you see on their faces daily.

I know how invested you become and how much you grieve when “your” resident passes.

I know…

I know there will be moments when your patience is gone.

I know there will be times when human emotions over ride scope of practice and find you on the verge of overstepping ethics.

I know there will be minutes when taking a deep breath to keep calm won’t feel like enough in the face of unimaginable and illogical opposition to the simplest of daily tasks.

I know there are seconds when the temptation will rise to mistreat someone who is pushing you past your breaking point.

And I know that those moments are fleeting in between hours and hours of love and empathy and excellent care – but I am certain those moments are there.

Please hear me in my plea to look in her eyes when the hard overcomes you and see past the disease to the person who lays beneath.

Please hear me in my plea to listen to her broken words and desperate calls when you are walking the fine line of overstepping and hear her heart and her kindness that’s just behind her fear.

Please hear me in my plea to walk away when you have passed the point of peaceful deep breathing and call on the help of your co-workers to step in and be a new person in the face of a lost mind.

I have walked in your shoes in private home care, nursing home care, and in my own family care. I have witnessed the moments where the job becomes just too much, I have felt the intensity of emotion that has left me calling for help in order to keep my own composure, and I know just how incredibly exhausted you are when your head hits the pillow at the end of the day.

I ask you to help me trust this new home by loving my Grandmother when she is in your care. I ask you to help me have faith in what I know is sometimes a broken system, that she will not slip between the cracks of stress and emotion. I ask you to help me keep the pixie dust alive and help her to find joy and magic even in this new lonesome space she will live her final days.

I write this to you with great gratitude and respect for the profession you have chosen, and I write this to you as a reminder that even in the mundane daily tasks of brief changes and dinner feedings, outbursts and tears, you will remember where these people came from, who they were before the disease, and why – like you – they are so worthy of respect, dignity and love.

Sincerely,

Caregiver, CNA, Doula,  and Granddaughter who really, truly knows.