Blessing for Aides

The following post is dedicated to all the CNA/HHA’s who work selflessly to tend to patients’ most intimate needs, especially the six women on my Hospice Team. I wrote this for their special week of honor.

Feel free to check out my old post “The One Armed Bitch Named Jesus.” I wrote it in honor of them as well.

They are often the first to notice our patients’ decline. Inspecting the gentle folds, mounds, wrinkles, crevices, and colour while caressing back to cleanliness and comfort bodies no longer able to care for themselves. Once, our patients were babies and their Mother held them at her breast and nursed them to life. Now, these gentle women hold them to their breasts of love as they help lay them down gently before the Big Sleep.

They know who has enough love, and who goes gravely without. They know the wives about to lose their minds, and the sons who coo in their fathers’ ear sweet words of assurance. They know who eats. They know who does not. They know when the bladder function begins to fail. They know the secret chocoholics. They know those desperately lonely. They know the ones just plain desperate. They know the most intimate of secrets, and still come and care regardless.

What kind of person wakes up in the morning, smiles at the new day, makes their breakfast and then happily goes to wipe poop off fannies for a living? How can someone do this with such tenderness when even family cannot? Love. Unconditional love for neighbour is the only answer. When they heard The Voice of Love calling and asking, “Whom shall I send to tend to my children who are sick, elderly and dying? Whom will tend the least of these?” they responded, “Here I am; send me.”

Let us bless them, our Certified Nursing Assistants and Home Health Aides, for they bless all of us. They bless us by being on the frontlines of tender care and showing gentleness and grace to all they serve, regardless of who they are, how they act, or the severity of their condition. We bless them today, and always, in the name of the Love they so generously give out of the abundance of their own hearts and lives.

Amen.