When healthcare aides enter your home, some leave quickly. They say it’s too much work or the fit just isn’t right. And some leave for unexplained reasons. But with the good ones, they come in as strangers, but can become part of your life, almost like family.

I find myself learning from them. Most have had hard lives and lacked the advantages I’ve had.  But they’ve been schooled by life; they have wisdom and stories to tell if you’re willing to listen. 

All of our aides are immigrants. They come from Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica or elsewhere. Doreen, our wonderful aide from Jamaica, said, “do you ever see a white person doing this job? They think they are above cleaning up bodies.” My father, as a homeless young teenager in the Ukraine, washed the filthy underwear of the rich to survive. He told us many times, all work is honorable. He, too, was an immigrant in America.

How could I manage my husband’s care without immigrants? It sickens me that our president insults them as rapists, drug dealers, criminals or would-be terrorists. He wants to build walls to keep them out. If he has his way, America will no longer be a refuge for the exiles, the poor and “tempest-torn,” as Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty declares.  The aides that we have had come bearing gifts and blessings, as they tend to bodies and minds that are troubled. It breaks my heart that they work so hard for so little money.

Hannah, from Ghana, was the first who came to us more than a year and a half ago, after my husband had been released from rehab. I was terrified, even thought Tony might die at any time. But Hannah said “Only God knows when it’s a person’s time. You can’t get so upset. You have to stay up or you’ll bring him down.”  Soon she told me her story—how twelve years earlier, she gave birth to quadruplets. The last to be born, a tiny girl, had so much wrong that the doctors didn’t expect her to survive. She spent a long, long time in the hospital, and for much of her life has been in and out of their care, but increadibly, not for the past two year. He story was an inspirational miracle. Hannah, a person of deep faith, told me how she’s taken care of Nora all these years with never any respite. After so many hospitalizations and a trachea that has to be kept clean, Nora needs 24 hour nursing care that Hannah has had to fight for. “You have to be strong, Achsah,” Hannah said, “and know it’s not all up to you.” I knew from the first week that Hannah was an angel sent to teach me patience, which doesn’t come naturally.

When I needed more help, particularly during the night, Hannah brought me her brother Aaron, a gentle man, and her sister-in-law Mary, who comforts me when I get afraid, sharing what she knows about what might lie ahead, but assuring we can deal with it. She has spent time doing hospice care, sitting by people, holding their hands when they die.  Mary sometimes looks so serious and somber. Just recently, she told me that when she was sixteen, her beloved twenty-year old sister died. Now, she holds people who are dying, comforting them, doing for them what she couldn’t do for her sister, She becomes attached to these people, as if they are the sister she still mourns, who is always in her thoughts. 

These wonderful beings watch over Tony, caring for him during the day, keeping him safe all night, attending to him when he calls out not knowing what he needs. Aaron has been with us more than a year but I only now learned that his children and wife still live in Ghana. A necessary family separation that enables him to support them. One evening, he said, “how wonderful it is in Ghana. My big family, we all get together.” They sit around, talk, eat and relax, enjoying each other, not staring at cell phones. Aaron’s eyes lit up as he described life there—so different from life here in America. Christians and Muslims get along. “There is no stress. All of us who come over will return to Ghana when we retire. We work here to support our families. But we all want to go back.”

Elijah is from Nigeria. We had a problem when he first came. Tony was having a bad day and Elijah put his hands on him: “Jesus loves you. Don’t worry.” Tony freaked out; he has a big problem with God, let alone Jesus. Elijah knows we are Jewish, but he was hurt. I thanked him for his care, but said he was upsetting Tony. Next time Elijah brought a pamphlet of Paul’s Epistle to Romans, and offered it as a gift to Tony as he was leaving. “Elijah, I’m sorry, but Jews don’t do Jesus!”

Elijah wants to share Jesus, but I’d rather share food. He often goes off to work an eight-hour night job after leaving us. He never brings food. I don’t know when he eats or sleeps. Elijah has his pride, but one evening I asked him to share our dinner. At the table, he began to tell me about how frightening his life was in Nigeria. “Islamists want to make it an Islamic country. There is so much violence; they hate us Christians.” Armed men have surrounded his house at night, invisible in the bush. They might attack his family at any time. He had to get out before they were killed. So a year ago, he came to America with his wife and three young boys. In Nigeria he had been an accountant. He knows many languages, including French and Arabic. But here in America he must work menial jobs. He’s underpaid and struggling, not just to feed his family, but to bring over his 100-year old father from Nigeria, the only one left behind.

Then there is Michael, from Ghana, with a soul as beautiful as his smile. Hannah brought him to us, when she and Mary and Aaron were all going to Ghana for a month. “You will love Michael,” she said, and she was right. Michael took over the 10-hour nights for five weeks. I saw the way he was with Tony—patient, tender, calm, strong and gentle. Night after night, whatever the situation was—whether Tony slept or whether he called out all night -- Michael was steady and calmed him down, displaying the model of patience and kindness.

I liked him so much. The moment he walked in, the spirit in the apartment changed. He was quiet, just did his kind job with grace and competence, while never raising his voice or giving commands to Tony. I longed to know who this remarkable person was. From just a few comments, I knew we shared the same values, despite our different backgrounds. Michael had something I wanted—calm, joy and patience.  Every night when he came in at 10, I asked, how was your day? “Wonderful,” he said, smiling, radiating a peaceful happiness.  Because of this I wanted to learn more about Michael the person. Did he live alone? Did he have a family?  “I’m a lone star,” he said. An introvert, but high on empathy. He told me he tries to put himself in the place of his patient; and he listens. To listen is not to judge, but to understand. Just before he left, he finally told me a little about himself.

Michael lives a simple life; works almost every day of the year, often 12 hour days, then goes home to his small apartment, makes oatmeal, showers, and goes to bed, luxuriating in his sleep. He has three good friends, but that is enough because his needs are met. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a person so at peace, so happy, but he’s worked for it. As a young man, he admitted, he was angry, but then something happened and the anger left. He told me of his experiences with white people he’s worked for. Some people were unkind and made assumptions about who he was just because he was black. But he refused to mirror that prejudice in generalizing about whites, or Jews. “You know, who worked for black civil rights?” he said the morning before his final night with us. “White Jews! Why should I hate them?’ Michael, with his beautiful black skin and his gorgeous white smile, is my model of kindness, empathy, patience, wisdom and goodness.  He is someone I aspire to. Knowing we were going to miss his presence terribly, we took pictures that I’ll always treasure.

Such caretakers are angels; they appear, they leave a message and eventually leave altogether. Many of them have biblical names: Hannah, Aaron, Mary, Elijah. Michael never would tell me his last name—and I said to myself, well that’s how it was in the Bible, when angels came, they didn’t carry a last name with them either.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post , I’m not a very calm person. Instead, I tend towards impatience, exuberance and anxiety, but not necessarily all at once or in that order. 

In the 1990s I made several attempts to calm down. I tried a meditation class at our local synagogue in Champaign, Illinois, led by a Buddhist Zen master who was also Jewish and thought you could combine the two traditions. Our homework was to meditate every day, starting with five minutes and building up from there. So the next morning, I sat on a chair in the dining room of our house with the sun pouring in the windows from the east. I put my hands on my knees, planted my feet solidly on the floor. My beloved Golden Retriever mix, a rescue dog, who was always at my side, lay down near my feet.  I tried to sit quietly, but she got anxious, kept prodding me with her nose. Every time I tried to meditate quietly, she continued to prod, thinking I was dead.  Finally, I just gave up.

About the same time, my husband tried a meditation class, led by a psychologist at the Park District, which met at the local high school. The small group who assembled was instructed to close their eyes and think of a kind, benevolent figure to focus on. “Think of God, or Jesus,” he said.  Well that didn’t work for Tony. He’s Jewish, but agnostic. He had a problem with God or any authority figure for that matter. When the instructor told him to visualize any figure that made him happy, he thought, “Frosty the Snowman,” barely able to contain his laughter. Needless to say, he didn’t go back.

A couple of years later, a close friend of mine was dying of a rare kind of uterine cancer and I was with her the night she died. Around the same time, my mother in Rowayton, Connecticut, had slipped into the sad silence of Alzheimer’s, spending most of her days in a rose velour recliner. I needed to escape from all this sadness and stress, but I also needed to go back to visit my mother on our winter break. There had been an article in the New York Times about a guest house run by the nuns of St. Birgitta in Darien, Connecticut, less than ten miles from our family home. For a ridiculously small amount of money a day, you could get a room and meals. It was in a beautiful place with acres of wooded land and adjacent to the Long Island Sound. It appeared to be a slice of heaven. I only told my brother Wolf about my plans and he agreed to drive me there. I’d disappear for two and a half days. I didn’t know they would be interminable.

            We drove up the long winding driveway and I rang the doorbell. Down the long dark hall came a nun in a full grey habit:  “Oh my God, it’s a nun!” I exclaimed, “What did you expect?” Wolf replied. I guess I hadn’t thought about how religious the place was, that it really was a convent. She opened the door, greeted me seriously and showed me to my tiny room upstairs, with its little iron bed and cross on the wall over the headboard of the bed. I’d never slept under a cross before! When it was time for dinner, a nun hit a big iron gong with a hammer to call us down.

            I joined the small group of women sitting around the table. They seemed to know each other but made no attempt to talk to me. The dinner was nicely prepared, served by a silent nun, but suddenly it hit me that I always have wine with dinner, and I had no wine. Was it possible to drink wine there, to bring a bottle? But it was a several miles walk into Darien and the wine store, and they were expecting a big snowfall.  Oh God, I was going to have to go dry for three days. 

            A couple of the women seemed to have been living there for some time, maybe as residents, and one just didn’t seem quite right to me. Another was an artist from nearby Rowayton, who came once in a while. I was the only Jew, but that was fine with me because I like interfaith things. I’d read that the nuns said prayers every morning in Latin, sang Gregorian chants and that you could sit at the entrance to their chapel and listen in.  Well, that sounded very interesting.

But what was I going to do with the rest of my days? I had not brought any work with me because to my mind, that was the whole idea, for this to be a retreat. I didn’t have a book to read for pleasure, or paper to write on if I had any thoughts. No wine, no books, no writing. I got more and more anxious, thinking about those empty hours, stuck in the guest house with absolutely nothing to do. I found a small library, but the only thing I could find to read was a history of the nuns of St. Birgitta. I read it over and over again, sitting alone in the living room (where did the other people go during the day, i wondered?).  There was a TV (I don’t watch TV regularly, but I was desperate), with only a couple of channels: one for Latin mass, and a secular one, with news about the Bobbitt case.  Remember the woman who cut off her husband’s penis (furious at his abuse and possible philandering), and her dis-membered husband with the unfortunate last name? That’s what was in the news when I was there in January 1994 during my retreat.

A distinguished looking clergyman entered the room where I was watching the Bobbitt case, and sat down, probably expecting to hear mass. We soon went in to lunch. The nun who served the food was deferential to him—he was an important man from South America who visited them every so often. It seemed like the one moment of excitement in their life. But it was just him and me at the table. I couldn’t think of anything to say, didn’t know what to talk about beyond asking him where he came from, except to bring up the bizarre and (to me) hysterically funny case of Lorena Bobbitt and her husband. I pictured the panicked husband running around trying to find his penis! And so, I asked my lunch companion, sitting in his fancy clerical robes, if he’d heard about it, and if that sort of thing went on where he lived. He actually came close to laughing. I liked him.

Even after making such a connection, I thought to myself, I can’t stay here, I’ve got to get out. I tried to take a walk, but the snow was too deep to walk in. I’m not meant for a retreat, I thought, my tears turning to icicles as I walked. I’m not meant to sit quietly with nothing to do for hours and days. I’m a failure. What others found tranquil, I found stifling. I need the company of friends. I thought of my mother, riddled with Alzheimer’s, sitting and sitting, hour after hour, blank. Every time I visited her, I thought, please God don’t let that happen to me. And now here I was stuck in a guest house run by silent nuns, sitting in a beautiful area, but ice bound. Doing nothing felt like being dead.

And then it occurred to me… My dog had been right.