The Singing Home Care Aide
So, if you’re hiring, 71-and-a-half-year-old Gina Sanchez may be worth a listen. I say listen because I rode alongside the singing home health aide last weekend when she visited Allen, a 77-year-old coming off hip surgery, and Barbara, a 69-year-old with rheumatoid arthritis. Gina sings to her patients and sometimes with them and her rapport hasn’t just earned her a following but her agency uses it to recruit other musically inclined personal care workers off the retirement bench to fill a shortage. At $18.50 an hour, Gina is a bargain. “I bring my own sheet music,” she quips. At 9:30 am last Saturday, she helped Allen into his shower singing ‘Sunshine on My Shoulder.’ I could hear Allen hum along. She admits that the walk-in shower caught her eye. “I’m no spring chicken you know – I could use one of these.” She drives a gray Nissan to visits but “I lost it one day, couldn’t find it in the lot after a visit.” There was apparently a run on gray Nissans at the 55+ community in 2000 I joked. “This was before cell phones…I made the best of it and turned around and played scrabble with Anne,” Gina kept saying. “Anne had pretty serious dementia – I remember we’d sit together on this ugly purple dotted plastic covered piano bench singing the old Platters song “Only You.” Gina says they’d mess up the lyrics and laugh. “Anne would say the chorus over and over - like 12 times!” Gina’s patients tend to live longer than expected but “I’m not a miracle worker,” she says, “just trying to be kind and laugh a little…” Probably fitting they sang that Platters song – “Only you can make this world seem right, only you can make the darkness bright.” My daughter is a singer too and has at times thought about her voice in the world, and how maybe there’s something to just showing up for people and making them feel better for a few minutes. Making them laugh. Like Gina does. Here in Brooklyn earlier this month Sophie sang this song for an eclectic group of Gen Zers, seniors and folks with a range of limitations but one common love of music. This song here, about why one can never fall in love with an Elf, made a few people laugh and a few smile, like this woman seated near us - her name was Gina, the home health aide.