TBT: Dear Employers

Before there was Dementia Dame, the website, there was Dementia Dame, the Facebook page. Today, we throw it back to a FB post from the past.

Dear Supermarket where My Husband Used to Work,

My Husband no longer remembers you. He doesn’t remember that you were his final post-retirement job. He doesn’t remember filling out the employment application, the interview process or the joy upon finding out that he had been hired and later had passed probation.

He doesn’t remember leaving for work extra early because he loved going to his job and his co-workers or coming home after work and excitedly sharing stories about his “day at the office’’ putting cans on shelves as the world’s oldest stockboy, as he’d joke.

He doesn't remember that he used to joke.

He doesn’t remember seeing his neighbors in the store or proudly wearing his work uniform consisting of an apron and ashirt.

He doesn’t remember being told that he would get 20 hours a week, which soon became 8 and eventually became 4 and sometimes none with no explanation.

He doesn’t remember asking why he was getting so few hours and after repeated requests to meet with his boss was told that while he was doing a good job that he was slower than others. He doesn’t remember how much better he felt when his boss apologized for letting him “fall through the cracks’’ by not getting back to him and being assured once more that he would get more hours.

He doesn’t remember offering to do whatever it took to be a better employee. He doesn’t remember the one-on-one instruction and getting frustrated when he still couldn’t get it.

He doesn’t remember being offered to clean toilets.

He doesn’t remember being devastated as time went on and how some weeks it cost more in gas to get to work than what he was making in pay.

He doesn’t remember that he was angry and confused because once again he had questions about his performance and no one would get back to him.

He doesn’t remember finally writing a letter of resignation and asking me to return his ID and uniforms to the grocery store because he was too embarrassed to take them in himself.

He doesn’t remember the humiliation that he couldn’t cut it as a stockboy.

After his resignation he was home fulltime. I work at home fulltime and so I was able to see what you had to have seen. He couldn’t follow instructions, he couldn’t finish a task, he had comprehension and spatial issues. Months later the diagnosis was in: dementia.

Looking back, how did we all miss it?

Whether you knew it or not, I don’t know. But let’s do the math: He was 72. Figure his downward spiral into slothdom was not because he’s staying up late studying for his chem final or because he was up all night doing shots with his frat brothers.

I was listed as his emergency contact yet you never approached me to say, Hmmm, something seems to be wrong with your husband. You never said, Hmmm, if he can’t do the job, should he really be operating a motor vehicle to and from work? Did you ever think of the pedestrians he could have killed? Or that he could have caused harm to himself?

Employers who hire older people, you need to get it together especially since you are facing a graying workforce. If your employees have a bad cough or a persistent sneeze, you’re all over it. If they show up drunk or exhibit signs of drug use, you make their business your business and intervene.

Yet, in the case of older workers some of you are applying different standards. I’m guessing you don’t want to fire or rat out Grandma and Grandpa, so you turn a blind eye and lead them along, all the while destroying their egos, questioning their work ethic and potentially putting others in danger and hoping that they’ll quit or die.

This dementia has us all shaking in our boots. We’re changing Depends, gently wiping drool and doing all sorts of things we never could have imagined. But your role as employers of older workers is relatively easy: do something and say something.

Sincerely,

The Dementia Dame