If you’re close to my aging vintage, you remember those adorable pioneers on the TV show “Little House on the Prairie.” Now we’re living in their world. Menaced by fires, floods, climate change and COVID-19, we understand what the Ingalls family must have felt, as daily deadly threats loomed and something bad could happen every time Pa rode to town.
That’s one thing the pandemic has taught us: That our lives were never as safe and stable as we thought. Humans throughout history have mostly understood their insignificance and vulnerability, and only a few generations ago school children dove under desks to practice for nuclear annihilation. But somewhere along the way, we started assuming everything would always be OK. Now, with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse frothing in the wings, our fragility has our full attention.
For learning how to accept that troubling fact, there’s no profession better than long-term care. Many of our residents have endured incredible trials and learned the secrets to survival. Never believing life would be anything but difficult, they embraced hardship and change, took nothing for granted and appreciated every moment. They’re the perfect role models for this unsettling time.
I’m thinking of Les, a senior care resident and Holocaust survivor who recently passed away. As a young boy, he was separated from his mother and sister at Auschwitz and never saw them again. “It wasn’t easy to be positive in the camp, but we looked forward to every living day,” he once told me. “There was no time to cry.” After enduring unimaginable hatred and loss, he somehow emerged with love and positivity to share.
His resilience still moves and strengthens me, and as you walk your facility hallways, you’ll find mentors like him everywhere you look.
Stop and ask what their greatest challenge has been, and how they dealt with it.
“It’s just life,” they’ll probably say. “There’s no time to cry.”
From the October 2021 Issue of McKnight's Long-Term Care News
