safety

Out tonight for a fun evening with friends, including the daughter of a grannie client.  Near the end of the night, she shared that her mother's most cherished friend at her senior residence - the only one there who met & got to know her husband - was in the medical center & not doing very well.

To her surprise, I already knew.  I knew because the friend had told me about the impending return to hospital care & his sense that it might not go well.  It was a tender, quiet moment which he had taken the care to make.  It didn't really strike me until this evening, however, how important it was to him to be able to talk to someone about what lay ahead for him.  

Until just a few moments ago, it hadn't occurred to me that one of the things I do just by hanging around the senior residence, waiting for my friend or having supper with her, is make myself available to her friends, someone they know well enough for a heart-to-heart, but not too well to be...  not sure what the term is.

Sometimes folks, especially the elderly, just need someone to talk to who isn't heart-connected in any way.  And talking to someone from "home services" isn't the same as confiding to me.  They are employees;  I am experienced as a friend.  Big difference.

Although I don't come close to having the connection with this dear man that my grannie client does, he is special to me - intelligent, caring, someone you can lean on or just share a good gab.  We know many of the same places & have hooted over many a similar-taste joke.

It means the world to me that I was someone he could tell the worst to & know that it would be safe, that it would matter to me because he does ~and~ that I'd recognize it as a confidence.  

Never saw myself as acting as an emotional safety for my older friends, for people who might never be clients but feel they can turn to me for a special something.  In a topsy turvy world, they seem to feel a sense of safety with me.  Never realized that before.  And totally unquantifiable, because it's priceless.