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“I Work A Job That Is Meaningful — Just Not For Me”
My 2 cents on Benny Lim’s recent post
Benny’s piece resonated with me. I was a live-in caregiver in Pensacola before I came back to my childhood stomping grounds to take care of sick and dying parents. That was hard enough but still didn’t hold a candle to the position in Florida. Close but not quite.
The client, I hate to call people patients when they’re still living at home, was demanding and spoiled. The only daughter of parents who came into parent life late in life, she was no doubt handed everything and it showed. She had two older brothers. One had died before I met the family as well as her mother who had died of breast cancer.
The father, then in his 70s, couldn’t do the day-to-day tasks that needed to be done to care for her as she could do little for herself. She had been in a wheelchair since she was 12. Her hands were deformed so while she could hold a utensil to feed herself someone else had to cut her food up for her.
One day she had a meltdown. I’m talking about a full-fledged fit that included her yelling and pounding her fist on the dining table. I had been in her room cleaning when I came to the doorway and just leaned on the doorjamb and watched. And waited. I just let her get it out of her system.
