Bridging the Gap

Jasmine, my co-worker, is a 24-year-old high-school drop-out with a 7-year-old son, a car that died in somebody's driveway and a voucher for federally subsidized housing that she has just now received after three years of waiting. She has translucent skin, inky blue-black hair and six missing teeth. They were pulled because they were decayed. They were decayed because she couldn't afford to go to a dentist. Jasmine is here at Maplewood, frequently working double shifts so she can maybe save enough money to go back to school and get her high-school GED, because this is the best job she can find. It beats her last job, loading trucks for a Target store at four in the morning. Yet, like so many bottom-of-the-rung jobs in the health-care industry, it offers no health insurance, no sick days, no vacation days, no job security, not even a paid lunch break.

The chasm between the importance of the job and the remuneration is astonishing, but no more astonishing than the chasm between the money spent to build a memory care facility like this and the money spent on employees to keep it running. Maplewood is clean, bright and modern with homey "neighborhoods" and outdoor patios and a big, sky-lit common area with real plants and chirping birds. The interior design, which allows for safe and secure wandering—one of the hallmark behaviors of Alzheimer's—is carefully conceived and nicely accomplished.

But the place is understaffed, and the staff is overworked. Jasmine and I each care for between 11 and 14 residents on our own. Our training consisted of a six-hour orientation session, most of which was spent reading the employee manual aloud to each other. This was followed by shadowing a more experienced worker for two days. On the third day, we did the job ourselves, with minor oversight. On the fourth, we were on our own.

Not much is invested in training us because most of us don't stay with the job for longer than a few months. Our residents, however, are often here for years, their families paying from $45,000 and $60,000 annually, depending on the level of care needed. If Jasmine and I work eight hours a day, five days a week for 52 weeks, we still wouldn't clear $15,000 each after deductions. But of course, we don't put in that time. I am gone in four months, and Jasmine, considered a veteran by then, is gone in five.

Those are the facts, but they are misleading, for as tough and often unpleasant as this job was, as little as it paid, it was also, to my enormous surprise, the best job I've ever had. It taught me patience. It taught me how to live in the moment. It taught me how to communicate with people who no longer have words. It taught me that we are more than the sum of our remembered past, that when it seems as if everything is gone, something still remains.

© 2007