Lessons On Love and Loss
Note: all names used are pseudonyms.
I’ve spent the past three years working in long-term care. Long-term care is where individuals go when they require more physical support to help them throughout their daily activities than they can provide themselves, or their loved ones can provide for them. While the community style of retirement living is resembled in long-term care, moving to the latter usually happens because of a loss of autonomy due to one’s depleting conditions or other factors in their life. Because of this, long-term care is most often one’s end destination—the place they’ll spend the rest of their life, whether that is months or years. Working in long-term care has allowed me to become all too familiar with the final moments of a person’s life, lost to their declining health. Yet, amidst countless jarring experiences I’ve had working in long-term care, I have learned important lessons of patience, kindness, love, and acceptance.
In long-term care I work as a dietary aide. For the residents, I’m admired as the girl who prepares their desserts. Each day I show up and do my part; A cog in a much bigger wheel within the industrial kitchen. I set the dining room, make the coffee, scoop the food onto plates, clean the dining room, do the dishes, repeat. But within this mundane cycle, those in-between points when I walk down the hall to and from the kitchen or am cleaning the dining room as the last few residents finish their meals are opportunities when I can finally connect.
“As a kitchen staff, my role in these peoples’ lives is minuscule, but I can’t help but think I have a special purpose beyond my list of daily tasks.”
In my role, I am never providing direct care to the residents, spending most of my time providing service from behind the scenes. While I wish there was more time for me to spend with the residents, I recognize and appreciate that in my role I can experience the few good moments amongst many difficult points in the day. My interactions are moments when I wave from my kitchenette, or when I catch them looking at me through the window and do a little dance to try to induce smiles. These sweet moments fill the cracks of what are often hard days for everybody, staff and residents. Finding these moments in my days makes me feel fulfilled and makes going to work feel meaningful and impactful. Working in the home of the residents that lived there, I had to quickly learn an appropriate balance of professionalism and love. My unique friendships with my residents modelled what every other relationship in my life could use a little more of: love, patience, and being made to feel special, seen and validated. Experiencing small, happy moments in the day with the residents I serve always makes my day, makes the mundane work feel rewarding, and strengthens my dedication to my work.
Residents living in long-term care are so often forgotten. They stop having their stories heard as often, and because their stories aren’t heard, they stop telling them. They move into a room that looks the same as everybody else’s, and their identity equates to no more than their demeanour and the things they share about their lives. While loved ones are able to visit, not everybody gets visitors. None—maybe few—of the staff know about their lives before. Their youth long forgotten, and the relationships that meant the most in their 70, 80, 90, or 100 years of life. Nobody knows about their lives to the extent that their families and friends outside of the home do. As a kitchen staff, my role in these peoples’ lives is minuscule, but I can’t help but think I have a special purpose beyond my list of daily tasks: a two-way opportunity to care and comfort the residents while learning from them and transforming what I make of a mundane job.
Sometimes, my job shifts from its usual cycle into an opportunity for more conversations. On a rare occasion, I might be asked to find out the resident’s dietary likes and dislikes, which naturally lead to conversations of past lives that went beyond their ideal breakfast. As they open up to me, I open up to them too, finding points of connection. Goldie grew up on a farm with lots of siblings? So did I. Iris loved to paint and spent her life crafting, running her flower shop, and dressing colourfully? I can only dream I will do the same. When I asked Ruby what she preferred to eat and drink, she told me spicy foods and wine. This cruel world stood no chance of breaking her zesty spirit. Jean told me the story of her immigration from Holland, her husband coming first to make money and eventually affording her to move some time after. Her story brought tears to my eyes. I can’t help but think I would have heard a similar story from my own great grandparents who immigrated from Holland had I had the opportunity to have these kinds of conversations with them before they passed. It was incredible discovering how much these little conversations—these pockets of human connection—could change my day. I felt a desire not just to come in and do my shift work dutifully, but to walk through the halls with gratitude and a smile on my face. To love everybody around me like they were close friends. It was evident that I had so much to learn from each one of them, things that they just can’t teach you in school, and stories that you wouldn’t hear from your own family. My experiences in long-term care have taught me to be both gentle and curious with strangers—something that disappeared during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“My unique friendships with my residents modelled what every other relationship in my life could use a little more of: love, patience, and being made to feel special, seen and validated.”
Some of my residents could not communicate so easily due to health, speech, or language barriers, and interacting with them taught me a lot about non-verbal communications of love. When you want to show somebody love, and they cannot receive it in the same way as you do, you do what you can through small gestures. Sometimes I show love by stopping to sit and hold a hand or share a silly joke. Sometimes I show it by popping my head into the living room to say a hello, leaving it at that because I know that anything more would cross a boundary with the resident. Sometimes, showing love is collaborating on things: if a resident wants to help fold clothes or talk to me while I set the table, I go along with it. I do my best to make sure that the long-term care home—their home—feels as much a place of comfort for them as possible.
The emotional aspect of working in long-term care is anything but easy. Just as soon as they’re telling you about their childhood farm, their passion for painting, and the flower shop they used to own, you see them visibly decline. In one day, a person you look forward to making smile every shift—someone you are just getting to know—can be gone. The emotional toll of these losses have become a part of the job. While most days are great, there are also days that I find myself going home and needing to be alone, unable and unwilling to talk about my day with others. But building relationships with these people is so important and one of the best learning experiences I’ve had, never imagining it would come from a kitchen job. Making intergenerational connections is not something I do in my daily life outside of my family, and these small friendships I form at work are infused with decades of timeless experiences and incredible wisdom that have truly changed me for the better. It feels like working with two hundred bonus grandmas and grandpas, each with their own knowledge, love, and life to share with those who will listen.
I must admit that my job is miniscule compared to the incredible work the nursing staff do every day. But I feel lucky to be part of the cycle. I feel dutiful in upholding my routines, and joy in passing the familiar faces as I wheel the dishes to the kitchen, greeting them with our usual hello’s. I find peace in giving and receiving the same cycle of compliments, and in sharing the same silly jokes day after day that just don’t get old. My experience in long-term care reminds me to find value in the smallest pieces of human connection. It seems to me that after a certain point in life, people’s stories become silenced and others stop investing in them in the same ways that people outside long-term care invest in each other every day. I do not think I’m individually making long-term care a better place, but I take pride in doing what I can so that the residents and I can, mutually, have a good day.
My experiences in long-term care filled an interpersonal-void that I never realized I had until little moments of human interaction at work became so fulfilling. Understanding that everybody has a story to tell, and making spaces for connection, is a small step to opening up and letting others open up to you as well. I encourage everybody to be intentional about pursuing connection, especially with those you don’t know—it requires little effort and can change your approach to the world, impacting you far beyond expectation. Whether it be volunteering, talking to, or working with a population you don’t often interact with, or adopting the smallest of actions, like smiling to people you pass on the street, everybody could use a little more love and acceptance. Reclaiming the practice of real-life human connection is uncomfortable, but as I learned from working in long-term care, to seek connection you have to be willing to offer it yourself.
Illustration by: Valerie Letts
Written by: Lauren Zweerink