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Put Me In the Home
Sep. 28th, 2023 10:05 pmLately I've been feeling a deep sense of longing while listening to nursing home interviews.
Audio interviews are so much more satisfying than paper forms.
It's all the same info, but you can hear how the residents interact with nursing home staff, or with their spouses living with them, or with their children there to visit. You can hear their environment, the bustling noises of the facility: people shouting hello to each other in the hall; or the clanking of dishes if they're near the dining hall; or a fan running in the room; or the sound of cars or birds if they're interviewing outside.
It's the same kind of longing--almost nostalgia--that I felt with my job at CapTel.
In that role, I was briefly transported to a snippet of someone else's life.
And in this role, I am there with the elderly person in their room, holding my breath in empathy as they struggle to remember their birthdate, or smiling as they tell the story of how they met their husband. I hear the fan in the window where they are, and almost feel the breeze.
What has really touched me (something that's different from my work at CapTel) is the genuine LOVE and CARE that most of these nursing home residents are receiving from the staff. And no, it's not just because they're being recorded. Believe me, residents speak VERY freely when there is something that they don't like about their living situation. Some residents did not come to the homes by choice; their children or spouses forced them, or they've just had a stroke or a fall, and now they're scared or angry or depressed or bitter. And they voice those emotions QUITE clearly in these interviews.
But the love and the care...I hear it, and it's real. The interviewer is always a member of the nursing home staff. They ask the resident for pretty basic information, about things like hobbies and interests and preferences, their perceptions of themselves or their friends or their family members. They ask these things specifically for my employer, TSOLife, because the goal of the company (besides making money, duh) is to actually, really improve life for the people living in these facilities.
First of all, you can tell by listening to the interviews that 95% of residents enjoy being asked to share their interests and stories from their lives. You can also tell that the nursing home staff know the residents surprisingly well. Often a resident will say that they don't have any hobbies, or that their hobbies are "in the past", and almost always the interviewer will exclaim, "That's not true! I saw you enjoying music trivia last week," or "Didn't you have fun going for a walk with me yesterday?", and the resident says, "Oh yeah!"
I have heard interviewers tell residents how much they are valued, and encourage them to participate in specific activities, or give them verbal strength and support if they are grieving the loss of a friend or loved one (a common theme for all of us as we age, seeing our friends and family and sweethearts die around us.) I can hear their tone of voice, the emotions of both the residents and the interviewers. I can hear real compassion, empathy, and love.
And I am drawn to it like a fly to honey.
At CapTel, the experience was more like floating above the globe, and then when a call came in, being pulled down Google-Maps-style to a pin dropped in some random city or town, farm or office, living room or kitchen table. It was like being a little ghost floating from place to place, experiencing little tastes of humanity, splashes of mundane everyday errands or frantic business deals or energetic conference calls or emotional verbal altercations. Piece after piece, facets of humanity from all walks of life. Racists talking proudly about their hate, Jehovah's Witness services that could last for hours, someone ordering pizza from their car, a son calling his grandmother in the evening. Hour after hour, and I loved it. I loved being "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once."
This nursing home auditing is more niche, and far more emotional because as I listen to people sharing their daily habits, and their physical ailments, and their memories from childhood, and their current hobbies, I know and they know that they are at the end of their lives. The people listening to them now are some of the last to interact with them. All of the information they're sharing, that someone so fastidiously recorded and wrote down, and that I am paid to feed to an algorithm...in a few months, or a few years, none of it will matter any more. The things that they're proud of; the house they left behind; the career they had; it will all be lost to time. These people are looking more back than forward, and as a result when they talk about their lives--even their current lives--everything has an overarching, big picture, epilogue feel to it.
It's like coming to the end of a good book: halfway through the book you were like, "I can't wait to see what happens next!" But now you're on the last fifty pages, and with a feeling of sadness yet satisfaction, you set the book down knowing it's coming to an end, and once it's done that's it, and wasn't it a great read? I'd like to read it again.
But you can't.
I think it's true what Homer said: "Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed."
I wonder if we get reincarnated. I think so (and hope so.)
Because life is too short and there is so much that we don't get to do.
-------------------------------------------------------------
All of that said, hearing the compassion and love and care that these residents receive, and hearing how surprisingly HAPPY most of them are, makes me long for what they have.
Sometimes, especially now when I'm dealing with anxiety, I feel so TIRED.
Sometimes, it sounds really nice to be assigned a little room that contains all of my scant worldly belongings, in a community where I have a schedule for sleeping and eating and exercising and participating, and all I have to do is just exist...just BE. Where outings are arranged for you, and it's OK to cancel if you feel tired because you won't be out money or inconveniencing anyone. Where someone will remember and care that you enjoyed music trivia last week, and will invite you to go with them again.
Where there is nothing lying ahead to trip you up any more. No more climaxes or tragedies or broken dreams.
Because there are only fifty pages left in the book.
The past is done, there is no future, and all that you are, all that you can be, is the here and now.
That's what I want, sometimes. The calm of knowing there's nothing ahead; the stagnant water and the still pond, and someone who cares, and who sits with you and listens to your last stories and observes your final days. And then one day, you don't wake up.
Ah.
Audio interviews are so much more satisfying than paper forms.
It's all the same info, but you can hear how the residents interact with nursing home staff, or with their spouses living with them, or with their children there to visit. You can hear their environment, the bustling noises of the facility: people shouting hello to each other in the hall; or the clanking of dishes if they're near the dining hall; or a fan running in the room; or the sound of cars or birds if they're interviewing outside.
It's the same kind of longing--almost nostalgia--that I felt with my job at CapTel.
In that role, I was briefly transported to a snippet of someone else's life.
And in this role, I am there with the elderly person in their room, holding my breath in empathy as they struggle to remember their birthdate, or smiling as they tell the story of how they met their husband. I hear the fan in the window where they are, and almost feel the breeze.
What has really touched me (something that's different from my work at CapTel) is the genuine LOVE and CARE that most of these nursing home residents are receiving from the staff. And no, it's not just because they're being recorded. Believe me, residents speak VERY freely when there is something that they don't like about their living situation. Some residents did not come to the homes by choice; their children or spouses forced them, or they've just had a stroke or a fall, and now they're scared or angry or depressed or bitter. And they voice those emotions QUITE clearly in these interviews.
But the love and the care...I hear it, and it's real. The interviewer is always a member of the nursing home staff. They ask the resident for pretty basic information, about things like hobbies and interests and preferences, their perceptions of themselves or their friends or their family members. They ask these things specifically for my employer, TSOLife, because the goal of the company (besides making money, duh) is to actually, really improve life for the people living in these facilities.
First of all, you can tell by listening to the interviews that 95% of residents enjoy being asked to share their interests and stories from their lives. You can also tell that the nursing home staff know the residents surprisingly well. Often a resident will say that they don't have any hobbies, or that their hobbies are "in the past", and almost always the interviewer will exclaim, "That's not true! I saw you enjoying music trivia last week," or "Didn't you have fun going for a walk with me yesterday?", and the resident says, "Oh yeah!"
I have heard interviewers tell residents how much they are valued, and encourage them to participate in specific activities, or give them verbal strength and support if they are grieving the loss of a friend or loved one (a common theme for all of us as we age, seeing our friends and family and sweethearts die around us.) I can hear their tone of voice, the emotions of both the residents and the interviewers. I can hear real compassion, empathy, and love.
And I am drawn to it like a fly to honey.
At CapTel, the experience was more like floating above the globe, and then when a call came in, being pulled down Google-Maps-style to a pin dropped in some random city or town, farm or office, living room or kitchen table. It was like being a little ghost floating from place to place, experiencing little tastes of humanity, splashes of mundane everyday errands or frantic business deals or energetic conference calls or emotional verbal altercations. Piece after piece, facets of humanity from all walks of life. Racists talking proudly about their hate, Jehovah's Witness services that could last for hours, someone ordering pizza from their car, a son calling his grandmother in the evening. Hour after hour, and I loved it. I loved being "Everything, Everywhere, All At Once."
This nursing home auditing is more niche, and far more emotional because as I listen to people sharing their daily habits, and their physical ailments, and their memories from childhood, and their current hobbies, I know and they know that they are at the end of their lives. The people listening to them now are some of the last to interact with them. All of the information they're sharing, that someone so fastidiously recorded and wrote down, and that I am paid to feed to an algorithm...in a few months, or a few years, none of it will matter any more. The things that they're proud of; the house they left behind; the career they had; it will all be lost to time. These people are looking more back than forward, and as a result when they talk about their lives--even their current lives--everything has an overarching, big picture, epilogue feel to it.
It's like coming to the end of a good book: halfway through the book you were like, "I can't wait to see what happens next!" But now you're on the last fifty pages, and with a feeling of sadness yet satisfaction, you set the book down knowing it's coming to an end, and once it's done that's it, and wasn't it a great read? I'd like to read it again.
But you can't.
I think it's true what Homer said: "Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed."
I wonder if we get reincarnated. I think so (and hope so.)
Because life is too short and there is so much that we don't get to do.
-------------------------------------------------------------
All of that said, hearing the compassion and love and care that these residents receive, and hearing how surprisingly HAPPY most of them are, makes me long for what they have.
Sometimes, especially now when I'm dealing with anxiety, I feel so TIRED.
Sometimes, it sounds really nice to be assigned a little room that contains all of my scant worldly belongings, in a community where I have a schedule for sleeping and eating and exercising and participating, and all I have to do is just exist...just BE. Where outings are arranged for you, and it's OK to cancel if you feel tired because you won't be out money or inconveniencing anyone. Where someone will remember and care that you enjoyed music trivia last week, and will invite you to go with them again.
Where there is nothing lying ahead to trip you up any more. No more climaxes or tragedies or broken dreams.
Because there are only fifty pages left in the book.
The past is done, there is no future, and all that you are, all that you can be, is the here and now.
That's what I want, sometimes. The calm of knowing there's nothing ahead; the stagnant water and the still pond, and someone who cares, and who sits with you and listens to your last stories and observes your final days. And then one day, you don't wake up.
Ah.
