If you look closely enough, you can see love in a person’s eyes. You can identify warmth and kindness. If you truly look and listen to other human beings, you can actually feel their humanity.
It has been my experience that the people who work as caregivers and servers at Merrill Gardens senior living communities are exactly those kind of people. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they find them. But they do. And those people, dozens of them over seven years, made the last years of my mom’s life brighter and more meaningful.
At Merrill Gardens at Ballard (WA) alone, there are workers from Tibet, Kenya, Rwanda, the Philippines, India, Japan and the list goes on and on.
I would like for you to meet some of them.
Latifa Kanal Essadi is a young woman from Morocco. She wears a scarf that surrounds bright eyes and a wonderful smile.
She was an elementary school teacher in her home country, and she took care of her father in the final years of his life. He died when he was just 56.
One year later, Latifa was notified that she had won a lottery to come to the United States. Her dream was to help serve people as a nurse or doctor. And so, she got on a plane and came here to chase those dreams.
“When I came here,” she says, “the moments I didn’t have with my father, I wanted to have with these people.”
“These people” are the residents she cares for at the Merrill Gardens community in Ballard.
Latifa gets excited when she talks about them. “They teach me that you are not alone. They are always here to love you and whenever you need a hug, whenever you need help, anything, they are here. To see them here every day, that has just made my life easy.”
She is the lead server in the dining room. Her job can be hectic and chaotic.
Latifa describes the rush of the dinner hour this way: “I’m super busy, there’s lots of people to serve at the same time, people are asking, everybody needs something or they want something that’s not on the menu… I have to please everyone and it can be stressful. But at the end when I see the smiles on their faces and they say, ‘Thank you Latifa, you made my day’, I forget everything and I start to get a new energy and strength and I am happy to serve again.”
Latifa plans to get her nursing certificate, and she hopes to continue to serve seniors.
“I’ve never felt like I wanted to find another job,” she says, flashing that smile. “I love staying around here and seeing the people. Like my family.”
Zayneb Moustakim is also from Morrocco. She has been at Merrill Gardens for eight years. She carries with her always a special kind of serenity. If you passed her on the street you might turn around and think to yourself, “That looks like a wonderful, kind person.” You would be correct.
Zayneb had never had a job before she came to Merrill Gardens.
She paints a beautiful picture of those first months at her new job in a new country. “This place, it honestly feels like home, because these are the people I opened my eyes to when I was scared and I did not know English. I learned the language from these people. A lot of residents would tell me new words and quiz me later to see if I still remembered them.”
What you begin to understand is that people like Zayneb are not only servers and caregivers to our mothers and fathers at Merrill Gardens. They are something more profound than that. They are their friends.
“I learned patience from them,” Zayneb says of the residents. She speaks softly when she speaks of describes her relationships with them. “Care, love. We care for them and they also care for us. A lot of them they want to know what we do outside of work here. They want to know our personal life and that’s really special to me when they care.”
There was one special couple, a husband and wife who will live in Zayneb’s heart forever. “They were so nice to me. They passed away and it was really hard. They took care of me. They called me granddaughter and they invited me for meals here, especially Thanksgiving. It’s really heart breaking when you lose someone that is a friend.”
Zayneb has been married for two years. She is currently taking nursing classes. Her dream is to help women during childbirth.
But for now, Merrill Gardens fills her heart in such a way that she just can’t pull herself away.
“Whenever I think about leaving,” she marvels, “something makes me just… it feels like I can’t go anywhere else. Something here makes it hard to leave.”
I used to see John Wangui at Merrill Gardens all the time. He’s a tall, handsome kid who just radiates kindness.
John is 26 now, and he came from Kenya on a student visa. After graduating recently from Seattle Pacific University with a degree in computer science, he left Merrill Gardens to start a career. He’s currently working on a team that is creating software that can help in managing adult family homes.
John made it a habit to ask the residents of the Ballard community questions about their lives. He loved to ask married couples how they kept their love alive.
“I always asked them how long they had been married,” he says, “and what kept them going? Some of them had been married for 60 years. Wow!”
He seemed proud when he told me that residents used to tell him he was a kind person, and that he would make a great nurse. “It meant a lot,” he says,” to be able to help them with a meal or help them get dressed. If I saw a picture or something I would ask them about it. Or I would ask them about their careers. I wanted to create connections and conversation.”
He really bonded with one resident, named Bob. Bob had been in the navy, and they talked about that. They talked about football, too.
I asked John what his dream is, and he answered this way: “I want to be impactful, and I always want to leave a place better than how I found it.”
“Do you feel like you left Merrill Gardens better than how you found it?” I asked.
He didn’t sound like a braggart when he answered, just honest and proud.
“Yes, I think I did,” he said.
Ayna Gebremichael has been a caregiver at Merrill Gardens for four years, but she’s been in the business for 25 years.
Originally from Ethiopia, she is married and has children, and she says, “There is nowhere like America.”
Ayna, like almost everyone you talk to at Merrill Gardens mentions one word: family.
“It’s not hard,” she says. “For me, I enjoy this job and the residents. I love them. I feel like they are my mom. It’s like my family. “
Ayna will always hold a special place in my heart. She was there in room 612 when my beautiful mom collapsed on the day she died. She was there when the paramedics arrived, and she heard my mom talking say some beautiful things. She talked about how much she loved her only son. She said she hoped she’d been a good friend in her life. Ayna, who had helped care for my mom on good and bad days, was right there with a look on her face that I will not forget.
When you trust other people to care for your loved ones, you can only hope that they will treat yours the way they would treat their own. And then you meet the Ayna’s of the world, and you are relieved beyond words. “These residents are like my parents,” she says. “My mom and my dad are all the residents here. I’m happy to work for them.”
Some of them have traveled from the other side of the world, others are locals.
Claire Fisher is a Ballard kid. She came to Merrill Gardens right out of high school two years ago. She took the job because her grandfather was living there, and for a time she was right there with him every day.
He passed away two months later, but Claire stayed on. “I want to be a cook, really bad,” she says. “I love working in a kitchen.”
To make that dream come true, Claire also goes to school at North Seattle Community College. She takes classes in the mornings, then gets to work at 11:30 am and works until 7:30 pm. It can’t be easy, but Claire seems to understand that hard work is the way we make dreams come true. And she says she’s made lots of friends Merrill Gardens. Friends who have lived and loved and learned about life.
"I learn about their lives, they learn about mine. We talk a lot.”
Same goes for Dayan Canales, who was raised in Mexico. She works as a server in the kitchen.
“I love working here,” she says with a smile. “I love working with elderly people. I love so much to show love to them.”
And Dayan has learned something that will serve her well in life. She has learned that old people know things. Lots and lots of things. “They give you great advice for life, for everything. I feel like they know a lot about life. Every time I need advice, I go to them and I ask them. Sometimes they make me feel better.”
When I ask her what the best advice has been she laughs. “Sometimes they tell me, ‘Don’t get old!’” And then her eyes light up and she laughs again.
As I said before, I don’t know how Merrill Gardens finds these incredible people from all over the world. But I know love when I see it. And decency and kindness.
And these people show those things every single day at 61 Merrill Gardens senior living communities spread out across America. They honor our mothers and fathers by serving them and caring for them with a special brand of grace. Their work is profound.
I know. I’ve seen it up close. And I’ll never forget it.