We meet two women, one a caretaker, the other nearly a centenarian – We learn about what it takes to make their relationship work, and how the caretaker's job is central to the older woman's independence. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| This is an iHeart Podcast. | |
| One of the fastest growing jobs in America is, can you guess? | |
| Caregiving. | |
| It's hard work, typically paid by the hour. | |
| And it involves giving assistance to other people as they go about their days, often feeding, dressing, and bathing them. | |
| Maria Martinez is the main caregiver for Agrippina Castellanos. | |
| Agrippina is 98 years old. | |
| These days, she's still mostly independent inside her apartment. | |
| So I tell her, if you go to an assisted living home, you'll be sitting in a wheelchair all day. | |
| And you'll be going from the dining room table to your bed and back. | |
| Why? | |
| Because that's what they do at those places. | |
| They're afraid you'll fall down. | |
| So she says she'll stay here until she decides otherwise. | |
| On this edition of On the Job from Hired to Retired, we've got the story of two women in Los Angeles, one of whom cares for the other, although they both depend on each other. | |
| First, a word about our sponsor, Express Employment Professionals. | |
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| By 2060, there will be about 98 million people in the US, over 65 years of age, more than twice as many as there are today. | |
| As our population continues to age and live longer, caregivers will be more important than ever. | |
| They will allow seniors to stay in their homes, and in some cases, caregivers will provide something quite simple: friendship. | |
| From Los Angeles, Roxandra Guidi brings us the story of two women tied together by a job and by a bond that's much stronger. | |
| It's Friday. | |
| That's the day when Agrippina Castellanos goes to the hair salon for a trim and a blowout. | |
| Every single week. | |
| Agrippina is sitting at the entrance of the salon, located on the first floor of her apartment building. | |
| She lives in Angela's Plaza, the nation's largest affordable senior housing project. | |
| It's home to more than 1,400 people over 62. | |
| At 98, Agrippina is one of the elders here. | |
| I've been living here for many years. | |
| So many, I don't even know. | |
| Well, at least 26 years, because you were the first one to move into your building. | |
| That's Maria Martinez, helping Agrippina remember dates. | |
| That's one of the many things she helps her with. | |
| Maria has been working for Agrippina for the past 10 years. | |
| She's always sitting beside her wherever she goes. | |
| When Agrippina comes to get her hair cut, Maria is there to help her push her walker towards the stylist chair. | |
| She holds Agrippina's purse for her, buys her snacks. | |
| Today she bought her a muffin, and she also tips the hairdresser. | |
| But Maria wasn't trained for caregiving. | |
| She learned by doing it on the job. | |
| This is the case for the majority of family caregivers out there, who usually start out by watching after a child or parent or grandparent at home and without pay. | |
| Until she was in her mid-40s, Maria had been a traditional stay-at-home housewife who raised four kids. | |
| She'd never had a paid job before. | |
| But as any mom would, she knew how to take care of children. | |
| So one day, when a friend asked her to cover for her and caring for an elderly woman while she went on a medical leave, Maria decided to give it a shot. | |
| She quickly realized that caring for seniors wasn't much different from being a mom. | |
| something she had plenty of experience with. | |
| Maria would end up caring for that first client for about 15 years. | |
| And then she heard that a fellow Mexican lady in the same building was looking for someone to help her. | |
| Agrippina had a reputation. | |
| She was very demanding of her caregivers. | |
| At first, the two of them struggled to find common ground. | |
| She used to have a really tough personality. | |
| When I first started working for her, I was really afraid. | |
| When you went into her apartment before anything, you had to go wash your hands. | |
| She's always been extremely clean. | |
| I try to keep her home clean, but she's also not as rigid as she was before. | |
| In time, Agrippina has become more easygoing, and Maria has learned to accept her quirks. | |
| The two of them are now close friends, or rather, their relationship has evolved into something that resembles the closeness between a mother and a daughter. | |
| If she had wanted to go, she could have left to work for somebody else. | |
| But I haven't let her go. | |
| I love the way she is. | |
| We get along great. | |
| I love her. | |
| I like her. | |
| I like her. | |
| Maria is patient and reserved. | |
| Regardless of what Agrippina says to her, Maria tends to reply first with a smile. | |
| She makes $11 an hour as a caregiver. | |
| That's $4 less than the minimum wage in Los Angeles, barely a livable wage. | |
| And she works eight hours a day from Monday through Sunday, every day of the week. | |
| We're listening to Roxandra Guidi's story of two women in Los Angeles. | |
| One is 98. | |
| The other is her caregiver. | |
| Their relationship has deepened and changed over the ten years the two have been together. | |
| More on that in a minute. | |
| This is On the Job from Hired to Retired, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. | |
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| On the Job, from Hired to Retired, continues. | |
| When a 65-year-old woman takes care of a 98-year-old member of the community, the relationship is bound to be complicated. | |
| Here's Roxandra Guidi. | |
| Since her husband died of a stroke last year, Maria realized that she needed a new sense of purpose, and she needed to find ways to get out of the house and stay active. | |
| So she made the decision to spend more time at work, and she's happy she did, she says. | |
| It has only brought her closer to her client. | |
| She willingly spends more time in Agrippina's company than she gets paid for. | |
| I live relatively close to her, and every morning and every evening I give her a call. | |
| If she doesn't answer in the evening, I just come on over immediately, because I wonder, what if she fell down? | |
| What if the phone isn't working? | |
| Sometimes she can't hear the phone, but I come anyway. | |
| Sometimes at 9 or 10 in the evening after my shift is over, you'll find me here. | |
| In fact, Maria spends more time with Agrippina than she does with her own kids or grandkids. | |
| And it's not because she needs the money. | |
| She lives with one of her grown daughters and has little by way of expenses. | |
| but she feels committed to her client. | |
| I'm really a homebody. | |
| I'm somebody who loves to stay inside. | |
| So here I feel like I do at my own home because Agrippina treats me so well. | |
| When my husband died, my kids begged me to stop working, but I said, I can't do that. | |
| I can't leave Agrippina. | |
| Every day, Maria arrives at the apartment at about eight in the morning. | |
| Soon after, the two ladies will sit to chat over breakfast. | |
| Do you want lemon juice or a little bit of a chur? | |
| Maria will then help Agrippina take a shower and get dressed. | |
| Until recently, Agrippina used to be able to tie her own shoes. | |
| But now Maria must help her with those too. | |
| If there are bills to pay, Maria takes care of those. | |
| Same for cleaning the apartment and shopping for food. | |
| Agrippina isn't too demanding about any of it anymore. | |
| Besides, they've been at it for a decade now. | |
| The thing she most appreciates is having Maria's company. | |
| They like to sit on the couch and talk for hours or watch TV together. | |
| Of course, all of it is a lot of work for Maria. | |
| Even when she sits down to chat, she's doing so by way of caring for her client. | |
| She's with me every day. | |
| Every single day Maria's at home with me. | |
| She goes home when her shift is due, but I am always confident that I'll see her the next day, even if she's late. | |
| I have a conscience that I'm seeing her, even if she's late. | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| Researchers say that older adults are at an increased risk of being lonely. | |
| By the time people reach their 80s, the majority of them live on their own, like Agrippina does. | |
| As a long-term risk factor, loneliness ranks alongside obesity and alcohol abuse. | |
| And according to a study from Brigham Young University, social isolation is just as likely to predict an early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. | |
| The opposite is also true. | |
| Companionship leads to better physical health and longer lives. | |
| And care giving in particular can have far-reaching benefits for seniors. | |
| It can fend off depression and chronic health conditions such as heart disease. | |
| Music. | |
| Aside from their weekly session at the hair salon, Maria and Agrippina follow another ritual. | |
| Every Sunday morning, they head to Agrippina's favorite restaurant, Philippe's. | |
| It's been around for longer than she's been alive, and it's less than a 10-minute drive from her apartment. | |
| She eats a full plate of pancakes, fried eggs and potatoes. | |
| She has no serious health problems, takes no medications, but religiously does take her vitamins. | |
| Not unless I have something that threatens to kill me. | |
| Then I'll go to him. | |
| Otherwise, I'm looking for the good things in life, so I can stick around longer. | |
| Later this summer, Agrippina will turn 99. | |
| She's the oldest in her family, and as old as Maria's mother would be if she were still alive. | |
| Maria is 65, old enough to retire herself. | |
| But she's not planning to stop working any time soon. | |
| It keeps her young, she says. | |
| And, like Agrippina, she prefers to be with other people rather than spending too much time alone inside her house. | |
| When they finish their Sunday breakfast, Maria helps Agrippina get up from her chair. | |
| She takes her by the arm, while Agrippina holds on tightly to her walker as they head towards the parking lot. | |
| In an ideal world, Maria says, her adult children will take care of her when she needs their help. | |
| And they will be as patient with her as she is with Agrippina, helping her along once she slows down. | |
| They will spend time with her every day. | |
| And if she's lucky, they'll take her out once a week to her favorite restaurant. | |
| We've been listening to the story of two women. | |
| One is 65, the other is 98. | |
| And the younger woman cares for the older woman in Los Angeles And they've also become friends. | |
| And the caregiver, Maria, tells us that she spends many unpaid hours, not only thinking about her client, but spending some Extra time with her as well. | |
| So I wanted to talk about caregiving with Gene Axius. | |
| He's Vice President of Independent Living and Long Term Services and Support at AARP where I used to work. | |
| And he closely follows the family caregiving landscape and the caregiving landscape in general. | |
| Let's start at the beginning, and we read a lot today about our aging society. | |
| So tell me what that means for you. | |
| How is the society aging? | |
| Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. | |
| I think that's a very fascinating question. | |
| We know that the population is aging. | |
| There are 10,000 people that are turning 65 each day, and that's gonna uh continue for uh the next several years. | |
| We know that not only are people aging into the age of 65, but they're also living longer. | |
| So you have this whole idea that people are getting older and they're living longer. | |
| And as a result of those two very fascinating, what I would refer to as gifts, uh it really creates some interesting conversations and some things that we have to think about as a society in terms of how do we actually meet people where they are, how do we provide the services that they need to live uh their best lives, and more importantly, how do we ensure that we are creating solutions that really help people in their everyday life? | |
| Okay, now in terms of home caregiving, like in our story for seniors who need some help. | |
| Do you break things up into, you know, unpaid family caregiving, uh partly paid, like our example, and fully professional caregiving? | |
| Are there ways that you break up the landscape there? | |
| So we we know that there are over 40 billion unpaid family caregivers in this country, that the typical caregiver is uh a woman, uh daughter, uh cared for her parent who uh has some long-term condition. | |
| Uh, we know that in addition to that, that 40 percent of all unpaid family caregivers are men, which typically surprises a lot of people, but they are also stepping up really to provide this type of care. | |
| Again, because of the population that is that's aging, uh, and also because of the fact that the family size is shrinking over time, uh, that you have uh the situation where who's gonna take care of me, right? | |
| So it's all hands on deck. | |
| Um so we know that there's over 40 million family caregivers um who are unpaid, and that the economic value, meaning that if you were to actually put a dollar to that contribution would be over 470 billion dollars a year. | |
| 470 billion with a B? | |
| 470 billion with a B. Wow. | |
| That that's kind of amazing. | |
| Now, one of the things I was curious about and and would be a service to our listeners who were just thinking about this, not necessarily going out to get a job, but is there a way that unpaid family caregivers can find through some sort of a system to be paid by by a government entity or somehow? | |
| Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. | |
| There are some programs. | |
| They're known as uh self-directed programs, programs that are typically uh covered through the Medicaid program. | |
| Uh it's it's really designed for people with um limited resources who are eligible for Medicaid. | |
| And um the vast majority of states actually provide some self-directed programs, which means that uh as a Medicaid beneficiary, uh you're able to hire people uh to help you with your care and dictate exactly when they actually come to provide that care and the type of care that they actually provide. | |
| It really depends on a state-by-state basis. | |
| Okay. | |
| And finally, I I want to ask you one more question. | |
| And I I know that your area of expertise is is partly the unpaid family caregiving, but if you were to talk with someone uh who is interested in this kind of work, do you think caregiving, some sort of caregiving would be something that would be a good option for someone that there'll be a need in society for more and better caregivers? | |
| So you're talking to someone who actually had the opportunity. | |
| My first job was working in a retirement community, and uh I had the opportunity to actually work uh in the dining room. | |
| And this was when I was in high school. | |
| And I had the opportunity to work breakfast, lunch, and dinner. | |
| I uh and I enjoyed it so much that I actually spent my entire Saturdays as uh in high working uh in the retirement community. | |
| And I can tell you that is it's extremely rewarding. | |
| And part of the reason why I did it was because of the fact that I felt as if I had an opportunity to really connect with the residents at the retirement community. | |
| I think For me, the other aspect of this was uh one of selfishness in a sense because of the fact that it gave me a rare opportunity to sit with residents uh who uh have a lifetime worth of wisdom and experience, and to hear their stories and to hear what they've learned over their course of their life, uh to hear uh some of the things that they regret, to hear some of the things that they wish they could have done. | |
| So I am a better person because of that. | |
| So I do think that caregiving has both its rewarding aspects, uh, both in terms of uh the ability to connect, the ability to understand and to benefit from that transfer of knowledge and wisdom. | |
| Uh, and I think that uh there are some benefits to really meeting people and getting a a great taste as to what it means to be a servant uh to someone else. | |
| Wow, that that's fabulous. | |
| Thanks uh so much for spending a few minutes with the case. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Gene Axius, Vice President of Independent Living and Long-Term Services and Support at AARP in Washington, D.C. Thank you so much. | |
| That's all for this edition of On the Job from Hired to Retired, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. | |
| Find out more at ExpressPros.com. | |
| Special thanks to producer Roxandra Guidi. | |
| Music for this episode by Steve Mencher and Ghost, licensed under Creative Commons by Cece Mixter. | |
| This podcast is produced by Steve Mencher, ForMench Media, Red Seat Ventures, and iHeartRadio. | |
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| See you next time on the job. |