Physically, Mom’s legs are too weak to stand or walk, and if she can’t stand, can’t walk even a few steps, the house she shares with my sister Katrina won’t be feasible. Mom will have to be at a nursing home for the rest of her life. To address this, her “skilled nursing and rehabilitation center” provides 15 (fifteen) minutes of physical therapy daily, with weekends off.
Mentally, Mom knows the very basics of who she is, but a conversation is like slurping soup with a fork with the lights out at midnight. It takes ten seconds for Mom to begin answering a question, and if she’s saying something unprompted, her sentences sometimes get lost on the way. To address this, the facility provides group games and conversations with other patients and a facilitator in the games room — an hour at a time, seven days a week. The exercises are designed to stimulate the mind in some way, so it’s not just games, it’s therapy.
Family and visitors are welcome to sit in on the both physical and mental sessions, and I’ve been there for several. I don’t have any complaints about the physical therapy, except that 15 minutes is far too little. And I like the idea of the group talk-and-play sessions to build mental acuity, but there’s a problem.
Of the six group talk-and-play sessions I’ve sat in on, two were run by Anita, whose badge says she’s the assistant activities director. She talks with patients, asks questions, listens to their answers, and subtly nudges them to think more clearly. Anita herself is mildly disabled, walking with a permanent limp, which maybe gives her extra empathy. She’s quite good at her job, and seems to give a damn about the patients.
Most sessions are run by Mehar, though. She’s the activities director, Anita’s boss. Mehar is not good at her job, and seems to give no damns at all. When Mehar facilitates a session, she’s looking at her phone all the time, reading instructions or playing audio that’s clearly lifted from a website for nursing home workers.
I don’t object to the cribbing, but it’s obvious during Mehar’s sessions that it’s the first time she’s read the material. She struggles with longer words, like ‘appropriate’. “Oh,” she’ll say, talking to the website, “I don’t know what that word means,” and then she’ll use her finger to flick to a different section of whatever instructions she’s reading on her phone. When the questions are designed to trigger patients’ memories, Mehar always says ‘rememories’ instead of ‘memories’, like, “What is your favorite rememory from childhood?”
Like a lot of workers in nursing homes, Mehar is an immigrant. Usually I’d say an accent doesn’t matter, but her job is helping people recover their cognizance, and she mostly adds to the confusion. The most commonly-asked question in any of Mehar’s sessions is, “What?” after she’s said something. The patients are all foggy-headed to some extent, but even for me it’s a struggle to understand what she says. “What?”
What I’m starting to understand about Mehar has little to do with language, though. She’s simply shitty at her job. I’m not sure there’s anything else to understand.
♦ ♦ ♦
After meals, Mom likes playing the piano in the dining room. I push her wheelchair up to the keyboard, she plays hymns, and we sing together. It’s good for Mom, and her face is at its brightest while she plays, but the second day she was at the piano after lunch, Mehar came over and slowly pulled the keyboard cover closed while Mom was playing.
She gave Mom time enough to get her fingers out of the way, then announced as the lid came down, “No piano today. We be play Bingo at 2:00!” She said it cheerfully, and invited Mom to stay for the bingo session. It was 1:55.
“I can’t play the piano?” Mom asked. Mehar answered, but I honestly couldn’t understand what she said.
“Not today,” I said. “You can play the piano tomorrow.” I was slightly seething inside, but I didn’t snap at Mehar. Even asked Mom if she wanted to play bingo.
“I guess,” she said, so I wheeled Mom to a table, and we waited and waited for bingo at 2:00.
Mehar’s “No piano today” announcement irked me, and still irks me. If they need the dining & piano room for bingo, that’s cool, and sure, we’ll quit the piano — but it’s tacky to just pull the cover closed in the middle of Mom banging out “How Great Thou Art.”
A dozen patients were in the dining room, seated at tables waiting for bingo, along with half a dozen visitors like me. Little seemed to be happening, though. No bingo, no pre-bingo, and more patients weren’t coming into the room. A few patients talked with each other, but most just sat there, bored and waiting for something to happen.
Mehar looked at her phone until about 2:10, when she walked around to all the occupied tables and gave a bingo sheet to every patient.
The sheets were 8½x11, with one large-print bingo game on the sheet, poorly photocopied, like the image at the top of this page, only with smudges all along the ‘G’ and especially the ‘O’ columns. You could read the numbers, but it was ugly.
I asked for a better copy — asked nicely! — and Mehar smiled, shook her head no, and showed me her stack of bingo sheets. “They all dark,” I think she said, and she was right. Every bingo sheet was yucky.
After passing out the sheets, Mehar sat down again, and resumed scrolling her phone. She scrolled through her phone for ten more minutes, while Mom and I talked about other things. She said again that she wanted to play the piano, and I re-explained that we were supposed to play bingo instead.
Mom said, “What are we waiting for?”
“We’re waiting for bingo at 2:00,” I said.
“It’s 2:20,” Mom said, looking at the clock. Maybe Mehar’s bingo-without-bingo session was a shrewd test to make sure patients could read clocks. “Could I play the piano while we’re waiting?”
Being a rebel I replied, “Sure,” and wheeled Mom to the piano again, but no tunes were tinkled. Lifting the keyboard cover was all it took to get Mehar to stop looking at her phone.
“No, no piano please! We playing bingo!”
“When?” I asked, still keeping my voice low and trying for pleasant.
“2:30,” Mehar said.
“You said 2:00 when you shut down my mom’s piano playing.” My volume was inching up.
“Bingo at 2:30.”
“Fuck you,” I didn’t say, but to Mom I said, “Do you want to wait ten more minutes for bingo?”
“I want to play the piano,” Mom said.
“Mehar won’t let you,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Then can you take me to my room please?”
As I pushed Mom’s wheelchair across the dining room toward the exit, I said to Mehar, loudly as we passed, “Nothing clears my mom’s head like playing the piano, but there must be half an hour of silence before bingo…”
4/7/2026
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