Meet Sergio... [View all]
My father is in a transitional care facility, following serious surgery for a subdural hematoma. I spent the past week in California, giving my brother and sister a break and driving my mother back and forth. At one point, both my mother and father had dropped off to sleep, so I left the room to walk the halls of the facility. Like most transitional care facilities, it is also a nursing home, so it's full of permanent residents.
As I walked down the hall, a man in his late 80s was sitting in the hallway in his wheelchair. He was a man of Mexican heritage, which you could tell by the white cowboy hat he was wearing and his clothing. That was the dress-up clothing I remembered from the 50s and 60s that was universally worn on special occasions by people who had come from Mexico to work on the citrus farms. I figured he was one of the long-time farmworker residents of the small town in California where I grew up. As I walked by, we exchanged solid head nods in acknowledgment of each other.
When I returned down the same hallway, I decided to stop for a moment and chat with him. My Spanish isn't terrific, but is adequate for casual conversation. I greeted him with a how are you today in Spanish. He responded with a "so-so" comment in Spanish. So, I knelt down and had a conversation with him. He has no local relatives, so doesn't get many visitors, he told me. I asked him how long he had lived in that town, and he told me his story of coming to the US in the late 1940s as a migrant farm worker, eventually becoming a citizen.
What struck me most was that even though he did not get regular visitors, he dressed each day in that formal way, and sat in the hall, quietly acknowledging those who passed by. We finished our conversation and I returned to my father's room. There was an RN in there, doing something, and she said that she had noticed me talking to Sergio. I had not asked him his name, nor given him mine. We had chatted as though we knew each other.
She said that Sergio especially enjoyed it when someone stopped to talk to him, but that almost nobody ever did. She thanked me for taking the time to do so, and said he was a real favorite with the staff there. He is apparently always dressed that way and never fails to greet the staff in his very polite and dignified formal way.
I was struck by this and by the uniqueness of this old gentleman who spends his days as a resident in a nursing home greeting people who pass by, even though he has no family living in that town any longer. I learned something from my encounter with him, and began greeting each resident I encountered there with a "Hello" and a smile. Every last person responded with a smile in return and a greeting. Such a simple thing, and yet such an important thing to people living in that situation.
So, if you have occasion to visit a nursing home for any reason, please take the time to say hello to everyone you see who is living there. If you have time, stop and chat briefly with them. It may be the only time someone does that. Maybe you'll meet Sergio, a true old-school Mexican gentleman, or someone like him.
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