Caring: A Labor of Stolen Time

This is a long, brutal, beautiful read written by a Jennifer Ng, a woman who worked as a Certified Nursing Assistant in a nursing home. She writes with compassion about the dying, and with righteous outrage about the treatment of the CNAs—who are, for the most part, immigrant women of color—by the home's management. She was an active organizer for what seems like small dignities—the right to have enough workers on shift at a time, the right to have their legally mandated 15 minute break—and faced severe repression for her efforts.

An excerpt:

We run on stolen time in the nursing home. Alind, another CNA, once said to me, “Some of these residents are already dead before they come here.”

By “dead,” he was not referring to the degenerative effects of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease that caused Lara, for instance, to occasionally spit her food out at us in anger and spite, or hit us when we are assisting her. He was not referring to the universal reality of human beings’ temporary abilities and our susceptibility to pain and disease. By “dead,” Alind was referring to the sense of hopelessness and loneliness that many of the residents feel, not just because of physical pain, not just because of old age, but as a result of the isolation they face, the sorrow of abandonment by loved ones, the anger of being caged within the walls of this institution where their escape attempts are restricted by alarms and wiry smiles. This banishment is hardly the ending they had toiled for during their industrious youth.

By death, Alind was also referring to the many times “I’m sorry,” is uttered in embarrassment, and the tearful shrieks of shame that sometimes follow when they soil their clothes. Those outbursts are merely expressions of society’s beliefs, as if old age and dependence are aberrations to life, as if theirs is an undeserved living on borrowed time. The remorse so deep; it kills faster than the body’s aging cells.
This is the dying that we, nursing home workers, bear witness to everyday; the death that we are expected to, through our tired hearts and underpaid souls, reverse.

So they try, through bowling, through bingo and checkers, through Frank Sinatra sing-a-longs, to resurrect what has been lost to time, migration, and the whimsical trends of capitalism and the capriciousness of life. They substitute hot tea and cookies with strangers for the warmth of genuine relationship bonding with family and friends. Loved ones made distant, occupied by the same patterns of migration, work, ambition, ease their worries and guilt by the pictures captured of their relatives in these settings. We, the CNAs, shuffle in and out of these staged moments, to carry the residents off for toileting. The music playing in the building’s only bright and airy room is not for us, the immigrants, the lower hands, to plan for or share with the residents. Ours is a labor confined to the bathroom, to the involuntary, lower functions of the body. Instead of people of color in uniformed scrubs, nice white ladies with pretty clothes are paid more to care for the leisurely activities of the old white people. The monotony and stress of our tasks are ours to bear alone.

Seriously, go read the whole thing.