Respect their age, remember their youth: life enrichment aide
Wednesday, October 5, 2005 - Natalie Miller
The photograph depicted a stunning little girl with her thick, black braids flailing in the wind as she jumped a fence on horseback.

The health care worker recalls finding the photograph as she cleaned out the drawer of a patient’s bedside table. Marnie Klein showed the photograph to her patient, commenting on beauty of the little girl, who reminded her of a young Elizabeth Taylor in ‘National Velvet’.

While each morning Marnie wound the patient’s thin silver braids into a cornet, she didn’t make the connection. The vivacious girl in the photograph was her patient.

“I didn’t realize it was her,” says Marnie, now a life enrichment aide at West Lake Terrace in Picton.

“She was so tiny and sweet and little and old.

“It made you realize this woman was young once.”

Marnie Klein

What she learned that day as a student nurse interning at Belleville General Hospital is something Marnie has not forgotten 17 years later.

“If you think of them during their prime, you see them in a very different way. I don’t just think of them as elderly. In all of us, there’s a part of us that’s 30.”

Residents fell in love; they experienced dramatic kisses; they held their children when they were babies; the ladies loved to wear high heels even if they weren’t practical and the men enjoyed racing their cars and trucks around, Marnie explains. She says they are people who raised families during tougher times, lived through the Depression and went to war.

It’s the woman now crippled by arthritis who was once a fabulous skier, she says. It’s the man who now uses a wheelchair but once rode a motorcycle famous for having no brakes. “He was a daring young man. And while he now eats pureed food and requires nursing home support, “His whole life hasn’t been that. That’s what we forget.”

One woman she cared for was the first-ever female vice-president of a bank, another was the first female goalie on the first female hockey team in Tweed, and another was a petite woman who taught in a one-room school who had success disciplining burly teenage boys through her quiet voice and mild manners. One man, who was the first casualty at Pearl Harbor, was dragged out of a fiery plane by his mates. “I got to take care of a hero,” Marnie says.

“I love the stories. These people have wonderful stories.”

Marnie, 58, has been employed by West Lake Terrace for two years. The former dairy and sheep farmer when to school at age 40 to become a registered practical nurse. She and her husband thought it was time for a career change.

She likes her job as a life enrichment aide because “you get to spend a lot of time with the individuals. Less paperwork and more people work,” Marnie says. “It was like getting a dream job at 56. It’s the job I know I’m made for.”

Marnie has always been fond of the elderly. When she was a little girl she took care of her grandmother who had shingles. No one could get her grandmother to eat anything until Marnie offered her a chicken sandwich, celery and carrot sticks, a cup of tea and two cookies. “I now have 48 grandmothers and grandfathers in a way,” says Marnie.

She enjoys working on activities with residents from crafts to bingo to current events. Marnie says it’s pleasurable to see their faces light up and their desire to never stop learning. Every Sunday the life enrichment department holds a current events discussion where they tackle news items like the recent hurricanes or Air France crash.

“It makes them feel they are still part of the big world.”