When I first started at the senior home, I had to wait for my parents to drive and pick me up. Of course, now that I have my license I would never go back to waiting on a bench by the parking lot, but when I didn’t have the option I actually kind of liked to sit out under the stars and the night clouds.

Sometimes residents would come up to me and ask about my life. Where I was going to school, who my friends were, what I wanted to do when I grew up… They made me feel comfortable, like they truly cared about the mark I was going to leave on the world. That was when I first started to realize how much of a mark they would leave on my world.

Dee* sat on the bench with me a lot.

“That’s the harvest moon,” She said to me once, looking up at the bright ball in the sky, “D’you know that?”

I don’t know why that sentence was the one that stayed with me, but it did, and I can still hear her gravelly voice reciting it.

Dee* was one of those people who used to be really smart. She probably is still very smart, but her old age had gotten the best of her. She was absentminded, took forever to make a decision, and sometimes wouldn’t even recognize me, even though we sat on the same bench every night for almost a year.

That was the one thing she never forgot: going to sit on her bench at night, and every couple of weeks we would meet for the very first time on that bench.

“Where do you go to school?,” she’d ask.

“Carrick,” I’d say.

“That’s not a bad school. What’s your boyfriend’s name?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I laughed.

“Me neither. I don’t like to be tied down.”

I laughed, until she shot me a look like she was completely serious, and then I laughed even more because I knew it was true.

“Do you have brothers? Sisters?”

“Three. Three little sisters. They live with my mom.”

“I have sisters. I have kids, too. They live in other places though. My daughter has her own TV show in Ohio.”

“That’s cool. What show?”

“I don’t remember the name.” She paused. “They never come to see me.”

That was the moment I knew that the reason the residents seem to care so much about me, is because a lot of them need someone to care about them.

Dee* is gone and I don’t sit on that bench anymore, but I do make an effort to care about the people I work for. I realize when they are going through a tough time, or having a bad day, or when all they do is leave their room for three meals a day, and that is literally the thing they look forward to the most. I try to make those days better, a little brighter.

The residents taught me how to listen, even when I really didn’t want to, and not just with my ears but with everything I had. And that’s all you had to do, was listen. Ninety-nine percent of the time if you are just willing to listen to someone, you can make them feel a hell of a lot more important than they felt before. I found that while I listen to what they have to say, I find something to love in everyone, because everyone deserves to be loved by someone.

*Names may be changed for privacy/confidentiality purposes.