Home-care aide Cheryl Jones is dedicated to giving frail seniors what most of them want: the chance to live with dignity in a familiar place.

By Beth Macy
published Sunday, April 20, 2008

It was time, her doctor said. Margaret Bass, 77, could no longer get out of the house to buy groceries. It was dangerous, even, for her to stand at the stove to cook.

Bass — or “Mother Bass,” as she’s known throughout her Northwest Roanoke neighborhood — needed to move into a nursing home right away, according to her doctor.

Margaret Bass eyes a bowl of hot cereal that Cheryl Jones, Bass' home care provider, is cooking for her breakfast.

“But disagree, I did,” Mother Bass recalled recently in the forceful, passionate cadence of a black minister, which in fact she is.

Never mind that Mother Bass has diabetes. Never mind the severe swelling in her legs, or the fact that it takes her five minutes to inch her walker from the bedroom to the bath.

“I plan to die in this house,” she said. “I got somebody watching over me, not only God, but her, too.”

She’s referring to Cheryl Jones, a home-care aide who comes to her house three times a week.

Jones provides what’s called companion or home care — tasks that don’t fall into the realm of nursing care and yet are critical enough that Mother Bass could not live at home without them. Jones gives her a bath, cooks the pinto beans and corn bread she loves, does her laundry and makes sure she’s taking her medicine.

Jones is a foot soldier in the national march away from institutionalized care — 6.4 percent of seniors resided in nursing homes in 2004, down from 9.6 percent in 1985. She’s among the hundreds of in-home aides dedicated to giving Roanoke’s growing ranks of frail seniors what the vast majority of them want: the chance to live out their lives at home.