It happens at least three times a day, sometimes more, and each time it catches me in the middle of something I thought was urgent. A resident at one of our Golden Pines homes will walk up to me, or to one of our caregivers, and ask a question she asked five minutes ago, and five minutes before that, and five minutes before that. "When is my daughter coming?" That is the question, and it comes with the same worry in the eyes, the same slight trembling of the hands, the same need for an answer that will hold. It never holds. But that is not her fault, and the day I truly understood that was the day everything about how I see patience changed.
I came into senior care from a completely different world.. chemical engineering, then financial advising at New York Life, then the leap into entrepreneurship. And in every one of those spaces, patience meant something like waiting for a result, tolerating a delay, enduring the slow parts so you could get to the good parts. That is not what patience means in memory care. In memory care, patience is not the thing you do WHILE you wait for the situation to improve. The situation will not improve. The person in front of you will not suddenly remember. The confusion will come back, and you will answer the same question again, and the grace with which you answer it is the entire point.
There is a woman at our Troy home, I will call her Lola Fe, who every afternoon around three o'clock stands by the front window and waits for her husband. Her husband passed away eleven years ago. The first few times I saw this, I felt the pull that most people feel, which is the pull to correct, to explain, to orient the person back to reality because we believe reality is where they should be. I learned, not from a textbook but from watching the best caregivers I have ever known, that the kindest thing you can do is not drag someone into your version of what is true. You go to where they are. You stand at the window with them. You say, "He must be running a little late," and after a moment you gently say, "How about we go get a snack while we wait," and you walk with them to the kitchen table. That is patience. And it is not passive. It is one of the most active, most deliberate forms of love I have ever practiced.
Granted, I did not always understand this. In the early days of running Golden Pines, I carried the same urgency I brought to every business I had touched, the need to fix things, the need to solve problems, the need to move quickly because moving quickly is what entrepreneurs do. I remember a morning when one of our residents, a retired autoworker named Ed, kept trying to leave the house because he believed he was late for his shift at the plant. He had not worked at that plant in twenty years. I spent ten minutes trying to explain this to him, calmly but firmly, and all it did was agitate him, and all his agitation did was agitate me, and by the end of it we were both frustrated and nothing was resolved. One of our caregivers, a young woman named Joy who had been doing this work since she was nineteen, walked over, took Ed by the arm, and said, "Ed, they called. Your shift got moved to tomorrow. Let's go get some coffee." He smiled. He sat down. It was over. I stood there feeling like the least qualified person in the room, and I probably was.
And so what memory care teaches you, if you are willing to be taught, is that patience is not a personality trait you either have or you do not have. It is a skill, and like any skill, it develops through repetition and through failure and through the slow, humbling recognition that your way of seeing things is not the only way. I started noticing this spill over into every other part of my life. In business meetings where a deal was not moving at the pace I wanted. In conversations with friends where I would have once rushed to give advice instead of just listening. In my own self-improvement, where I had always been impatient with the gap between who I was and who I wanted to be. The residents at Golden Pines, without knowing it and without trying to, taught me that you do not close that gap by pushing harder. You close it by being present, FULLY present, in the slow and unglamorous middle of things.
I know this sounds corny, the idea that elderly people with dementia are secret teachers and we are all their students, but I do not care that it sounds corny because it is exactly what happened to me. Ed and Lola Fe and a dozen others whose names I carry with me have reshaped the way I move through the world, and they did it not by offering wisdom but by requiring something of me that I did not know I had. They required me to slow down, to stop treating every interaction like a problem to be solved, and to understand that sometimes the most important thing you can do for another person is simply to stay.
In any case, I think about Mama when I think about patience. I think about her more than I probably let on. When she was alive and I was building my career and building my businesses and building everything I thought mattered, I was not always patient with her. I was not always present. I would call, but I would call while doing something else, and she knew it, because mothers always know it. And when she passed, I was not there. I was not by her side. I have carried that with me for years, not as guilt exactly, but as a kind of quiet understanding of what it costs when you are too busy moving forward to stand still with someone who needs you.
The thing I could not give Mama.. I give to strangers now. Every day, in a house in Troy, I sit with someone who does not remember my name, and I answer the same question for the fourth time, and I do it with everything I have. I do not know if this makes up for anything. I do not think it works that way. But I know that patience, REAL patience, the kind that costs you something, the kind that asks you to set yourself aside and be where another person is, is the closest thing to love that I have ever found. And I know that every time I choose to stay, every time I stand at that window or sit at that table or walk someone back from the door they were trying to leave through, I am not just caring for them. I am caring for her. I am giving what I owe. I am finally, after all this time, still enough to be here.
