RSC Reflections

My Office Has Become a Confessional

Each day they come, these residents of mine, with their aches and pains and their walkers and canes.  On their faces, wrinkles hint at decades of both frowns and smiles.  They sit across from me, with my office desk providing a boundary that demarcates our professional relationship but also invites openness.  Boundaries help people feel safe, and when people feel safe, they open up themselves to you.

Resident RG, in the midst of us working on getting him a disability claim from a VA office in Hollywood, FL, told me about all the ships he’d ever served on, about growing up black in Mississippi and joining the Service as a way to have a hope and a future.  As a boy, he got hurt once when he was far away from home and had to be rushed to a local hospital for help.  “Ah was the first colored person’d be treated at dat hospital”, he said, his round eyes glittering like beads.  Back on those days, being colored meant being second class, and he said he was happy to see that our country now had a black president.  RG was a funny man.  He winked at you and said, “Hi Baby, how you doin’?” (I imagine he did the same when he was in Asia with the navy and picked up prostitutes—he told me about that once), but when you demanded that he respect you, he sat down and told you about his life.  His nails were also most fascinating: he got them manicured on a regular basis, and his French nail-tips were painted green. 

Resident RW, born in Italy and raised in America, had fiery blood and hot temper coursing through her veins.  Phone appointments sounded something like this:  “Ohhh, you know, I got this letter and I don’t even understand what it says”.  Her voice would grow louder as she continued, “This is all so stupid.  Can you help me?”  She’d bring me her Social Security notices, and the letter telling her she no longer qualified for Medi-Cal.  “What’s this stupid all about?” she’d fume, throwing her head into her palms, mouth open with disbelief.  I told her to sit back and let me call Medi-Cal.  I would figure out all the details, and all she had to do was speak with them briefly and give them permission to speak with me about it.  At the end of the call, I always got a warm hug and kiss on the cheek.  “Ohhh….thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, and I could still smell her perfume on my neck as she walked away.

RW once told me that, being raised “the European way”, she took care of both her parents until they passed, faithfully driving them to every doctor’s appointment and taking care of their activities of daily living.  “Now, my kids?  Hmph.  Not them.  They’re too busy with their lives over there by the Ocean.  They’re not like you Orientals, that take care of your own, you know”.

Though I didn’t say it to her, I thought to myself that the stereotype of filial adult children amongst Chinese families wasn’t necessarily all that true.  I thought of Resident DL, who was born in a village in China and single-handedly raised three children.  Her husband cheated on her and lives in China with his mistress to this day; she immigrated to the States as an older adult, equipped with only a background of illiteracy and poverty.  Recently, DL had a falling out with her daughter, which happened during a visit to daughter’s house (30 minutes away by car).  DL's husband’s health is getting pretty bad, and her daughter wanted DL to invite the husband to live with her in the States to be taken care of.  When DL refused, daughter kicked DL out of the house and refused to drive her back home.  DL spent the entire evening slowly making her way home through the bus system, spending hours at the bus stop shivering in the cold.  “I can tell no one about this,” she confessed to me, “because what would they think of me?”

It is a shameful thing to be a Chinese mother who has raised unfilial, disrespectful children, children who don’t take care of you in your old age and don’t want to spend any time with you.  So when neighbors boast about adult children who send them expensive gifts or take them out to dinner every weekend, DL says nothing and has eventually stopped associating with her neighbors.

But even those with responsible and respectful children have sorrows to bear.  Resident LL has a wonderful husband and a caring daughter who takes her out to lunch frequently and allows her to stay over whenever she pleases.  LL has sought me out to tell me about her struggle with depressive symptoms, symptoms she attributes to having pent up sorrow within her.  She fears being alone, and she is afraid of answering her door.  For those who grew up in Communist China and experienced the Cultural Revolution, knocks on the door could mean many things.  I did my Master’s degree in this area, so I have an idea of what LL is describing.  People can do unspeakable things to one another.

LL’s daughter discourages her from speaking about the past.  “Your life is better now, mom, why don’t you just live out the rest of your days in peace?  Talking about it will only make you feel worse.”  But LL must tell someone, and somehow, because I hand out taxi vouchers to her every month with a smiling face, I have become that someone that she trusts.  In the confines of my office, separated by my work desk, she has found a safe space to speak.  She speaks of her husband, who grew up in an intellectual family and was punished in the Cultural Revolution for coming from a family of “privilege”.  He was sent to the countryside for labor reform, and while he was away, his parents were persecuted.  Things became so unbearable that LL's father-in-law committed suicide by jumping into a well with a heavy stone tied to his waist.  LL’s mother-in-law had a heart attack shortly after hearing the news and passed away before LL’s husband had a chance to see her.

“How can I possibly be happy while bearing these scars?” she asks me.  I have no suggestions to give, but a listening ear is all she is asking for.  “I feel better just sharing with you,” she says as she gets up slowly and hobbles towards the door.  “I can’t speak of this with anyone else here.  Next time, I’ll come and chat some more.”

As I watch her exit my office, I can’t help but think that, were I to be paid one penny for every secret disclosed in my office, I’d be rich by now.  Each resident who comes in to talk confidentially somehow thinks that they are the only one who shares, not knowing that there have been other residents before them who have done the same thing.

Earlier that day, Resident AC had shared with me that she left home at 13, fearing Communist persecution of her well-do-do-household (landlords under the pre-Communist feudal system).  She wandered from province to province until all of China had been trodden by her feet, and finally was able to leave China when family members got her out.  “I never want to go back again,” she said, tears welling up fast under her drooping eyelids.  I observed her worn hands ornamented with bracelets and rings, noticing how her fingers seemed to be bent the wrong way at the joints.  AC lost her husband 2 years ago, so she is alone in the States (with family in China and South America).  She walks to the market every morning and lives on her SSI allowance every month.  She has a caregiver that the State of California pays to help her with housekeeping, and her doctor bills are covered by Medicare and Medi-Cal.  “American Government takes very good care of me, and I am grateful” she always says when I help her read her mail.  “I am also grateful for you too,” she adds.  “You help all of us seniors so much, with so much patience...we seniors who are illiterate and useless!”

“One day I’ll be old too,” I always say, “and I’ll need people to help me then too.”

The first time I said that, AC looked surprised.  Now that was a new thought!

It’s one of the best things to see a gleam of surprise or hope in an older person’s eyes.  They say the eye is the window into the soul, and I have had the sacred privilege of gazing briefly into so many souls.  My office is my workplace and their haven, and amidst phone calls and applications to Social Security and other government benefits, conversations happen that bring a timelessness to my relationship with my residents.

My office has become a confessional, and I have unwittingly become a priest to souls that crave emotional and spiritual support.  There have been times when I’ve closed my office door to pray with a resident, and I have beheld true transformation in their lives as a result of those prayers. 

Remember DL, the one whose daughter kicked her to the curb?  It’s taken a few phone calls on my end and lots of reminders for DL to stay focused on what she knows to be True and Helpful in her life, but the mother-daughter relationship is slowly mending, and DL is willing to forgive her husband for his infidelity.  She still has trouble socializing with her neighbors and almost got into a catfight the other day, but isn’t that how the human condition often is?  We improve in some areas while regressing in others.  And at my residents’ age, all I can ask for is that they continue to live in the fullness of their humanity in whatever capacity they are able.

I have but a few more weeks left to inhabit this office of mine before I move away, and I write this a week before I will officially tell my residents of my resignation.  So many have said, “Please don’t ever leave.  You have to work here until I die,” and I am dreading the looks on their faces when they find out I will not be here in a few months.  As resilient humans, they will eventually bounce back, and someone new will take my place that they can hopefully put their trust in.  But I hate to think that my decision to go back to school will become yet another sorrow in their lives.  I hope they know that their stories and secrets have made me rich beyond compare and that I will carry their sorrows with me until the end of my days, knowing that there is nothing more intimate and more holy than sharing in another human’s suffering by listening to them recount it.  The office that has become a confessional is a storehouse for sacred secrets, and when I leave this job, those secrets will accompany me as reminders of this special season in my life.

Each day they come, these residents of mine, with their aches and pains and their walkers and canes.  On their faces, wrinkles hint at decades of both frowns and smiles, and I greet them with a listening gaze that invites them to tell me all about the stories behind those wrinkles….