Working within Elderly care – reflections
If you have not yet in life worked within social care, I highly recommend you to!
In a society created to put all focus on material wealth, to be seen, and to always be on the move forward there is an increasing group of people who need our focus, our care, and attention.
My first day in elderly care was in 2017 and since then my life has been enriched in ways I could not imagine. ✨
During my years I have gotten friends, mentors, and inspiration in the ages of 60 – 96 years old. I have listened to stories from all decades, both happy and sad. I have seen couples in love after 60 years together and I have seen eyes filled with sadness and loneliness while sitting next to an empty chair of a loved one, that just happened to be the first one to pass on.
I have also been part of lost dignity mixed with gratitude while wiping someone’s behind. I have seen what was once beautiful houses crumble and become as dirty as can be.
But more than anything I have seen into the eyes of loneliness, lives practically forgotten. Perhaps because of no relatives or relatives that didn’t care.
In the covid year of 2020/21 because of relatives that didn’t dare to visit.
A year may be nothing in the early- or mid-ages but when someone is counting the years they have left to live, one year can feel like a lifetime.
For fifteen minutes, perhaps half an hour I can make a change.
Perhaps I am the only visit of the day, the only one they talk to.
My time though is always limited, I need to visit the next one.
But I always try to make the visit not feel rushed. To listen, to ask, to make that moment count. Above all, I give them the only value all of us can relate to – time.
Fifteen minutes may sound like nothing.
Helping out by changing batteries to the remote control may appear to be no big deal.
But if there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that what may appear to be nothing to someone can be absolutely everything to someone else.
❤️
If you have not yet in life worked within social care, I highly recommend you to! We are needed and I do believe many of us need it as well.
🙏🏼
This is my side of the story, some of my thoughts about the big puzzle we call life.
What are yours?
Love / Pedro