Caring for People Who Cannot Give Back

I feel meaning and significance in the work I do feeding, clothing, and generally helping elderly people who can no longer fulfill those basic tasks for themselves. Not long after I started working at the nursing home, I started to wonder why taking care of these people mattered so much to me, and at first I did not have a good answer. Thinking about my beliefs and emotions was similar to the process I went through thinking about morality.

To illustrate my thoughts, I am going to give an example of a hypothetical resident at the nursing home, who I am going to call Betty. Betty cannot sit up in her bed without support, and her hands are too uncoordinated to grasp a cup of water she wants to drink from. She needs assistance with any basic biological function, from relieving herself to wiping away the gunk that slowly builds up around her eyes. Her speech is random and completely unintelligible.

Besides her physical infirmities, Betty has dementia, which was noticed and documented at a time when her speech was still coherent. She is always confused and believing she is somewhere at a past point in her life, or completely mistaken about her surroundings and what is happening to her. Holding a coherent conversation with her is impossible.

Financially, Betty is broke and is supported through either a charity or medicare. I want to include that Betty has no living relatives or friends who would notice or grieve for her loss. No one besides the people who spend their time keeping her alive, comfortable, and cared for will notice if she died.

The nursing home I work at has not provided care to someone with all of those characteristics in the brief time I have been there, but it is absolutely possible that there has been or will be a Betty there at some point. Supposing Betty exists, what is the value or meaning of her existence now, and why is it important to keep her alive?

Betty might have furthered human knowledge, created beautiful art, provided services, or otherwise made an impact on society through her actions before, but now she lays in bed, eats, poops, and mumbles. Despite the tremendous time, energy, and resources spent on her, she is completely incapable of giving back. Eventually she will die peacefully, but in the meantime she is simply consuming resources. From a practical viewpoint if she died peacefully sooner, everyone would be better off.

Ending someone’s life because keeping them alive seems wasteful and pointless is a repulsive idea to me. However, I did not have a rational answer to the reasoning that favored her dying sooner and the rest of us moving on. My first counter-argument of “Betty is a human being with rights” is true, but did not satisfy me. I could not explain why Betty being human made burning so much time, effort, and money waiting for her to die was worthwhile, as opposed to simply having her die comfortably and peacefully sooner.

Another thought is that it is simply hardwired into our biology to care, and perhaps that is why I experienced a disconnect between what I felt and what I thought. It is possible that caring for others is one of our traits as a species, but I wanted to find a reason for caring more meaningful than enslavement to my biology.

Eventually I found a reason why caring for Betty is significant. Betty, and those like her, offer us the opportunity to practice compassion and service in a way that we could not otherwise. Her simply being alive gave everyone around her the opportunity to practice pure selfless compassion, without any thought of reward.

Most of the time in our lives there is a sense for mutual exchange of kindness. A stranger I hold a door open for would probably do the same for me, even though they might never get that opportunity. Business relationships involve economic exchange. Friendships and relationships involve mutual care and understanding. One person not giving anything to the other makes the mutual exchange break down, but that is not the case when we care for Betty.

I think it would be accurate to say that caring and having compassion for Betty is similar to practicing unconditional love. Conditional love involves loving someone because of certain qualities they have that contribute in a good way to my life. This could be as simple as how a child’s laugh makes me happy. Betty is different is that she lacks many of the qualities that people love each other conditionally for, and yet she is still human.

Betty’s inability to contribute or give back makes her existence important in a new and significant way; she matters not because of how she actively contributes, but simply through being human. Unconditional love is one of the most elusive and desired experiences, and I am grateful to those who need care for providing a unique opportunity to become closer to it.