The Question He Couldn’t Leave at Work
After more than two decades inside nursing homes, former journalist Aldwin Fajardo-Ponder turns the stories behind the regulations, star ratings and inspection reports into his first book, Would You Leave Your Parents Here?
Aldwin Fajardo-Ponder did not set out to become a nursing home administrator.
He was a journalist.
He had worked in newsrooms in the Philippines and the Pacific, writing for the Manila Standard, The Manila Times and Malaya, and later for newspapers in the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam. He understood deadlines, editors, interviews and the peculiar occupational habit journalists develop of noticing things other people walk past.
Then he came to the United States, and somewhere along the way, journalism gave way to healthcare.
What began as work in medical records eventually led to quality assurance, compliance and nursing home administration. More than two decades later, Fajardo-Ponder is still in long-term care, now running skilled nursing facilities in California's Bay Area.
But apparently the reporter never entirely left.
His first book, Would You Leave Your Parents Here? The Weight of the Keys, published by Alduart Press, brings those two careers together. The eBook has been released, with the hardcover edition forthcoming.
It is not a manual for choosing a nursing home. It is not an administrator's memoir, either. And despite a title that could easily have been attached to an exposé, Fajardo-Ponder did not write one.
Instead, he wrote about the people.
There are residents and families, nurses and nursing assistants, therapists, housekeepers, receptionists and administrators. There are birthday parties and surveyors, difficult conversations and ordinary afternoons. There are people who recover and go home and others who do not.
There is also laughter.
That matters to Fajardo-Ponder because nursing homes are usually discussed publicly when something has gone wrong. Inspection deficiencies make news. Lawsuits make news. Staffing shortages make news. The ordinary lives being lived inside those buildings rarely do.
Fajardo-Ponder wanted to write about that space between the headlines.
His journalism background is evident in the way he approaches it. Rather than trying to explain the entire nursing home industry, he focuses on moments: a resident by a window, a husband who continues holding his wife's hand, an employee he initially misjudged, a receptionist who seems to know everything happening in the building.
The institutional language of long-term care is there because it is part of the world he inhabits. But the book is less interested in acronyms than in what happens after the meeting ends and someone still has to walk down the hallway and face a resident or family.
Behind it all is one question.
Would you leave your parents here?
It is a question Fajardo-Ponder has used with employees during his years as an administrator.
The point is not rhetorical. Regulations establish standards. Surveys measure compliance. Quality indicators generate numbers. But imagining one's own parent in the bed changes the calculation.
The question makes quality personal.
And then, while Fajardo-Ponder was finishing the book, it became personal in a way he had never anticipated.
His 88-year-old father was seriously injured in a road accident in Quezon City in the Philippines. The injuries were extensive. Suddenly, the man who had spent years talking families through illness, rehabilitation and discharge planning was thousands of miles away confronting those same questions as a son.
For more than 20 years, he had been the administrator.
Now he was the family.
The experience became one of the book's most personal pieces, “The Bridge.”
In it, Fajardo-Ponder writes about something long-term-care professionals understand but families often encounter only when they need it: surviving hospitalization and being ready to go home are not necessarily the same thing.
For his father, Fajardo-Ponder found himself thinking about the care continuum he had spent his career helping other families navigate: hospital, skilled nursing, then home with additional support.
That forced him to answer his own title question.
His answer was yes. Not forever. Just long enough.
It is an important distinction because Would You Leave Your Parents Here? resists the easy positions surrounding nursing homes. Fajardo-Ponder neither romanticizes the industry nor condemns it wholesale.
He knows too much for either. He has seen exceptional caregivers and difficult failures. He has watched employees do work that rarely attracts public attention. He has dealt with regulations, inspections, complaints and the enormous responsibility that accompanies the keys to a building filled with people who depend on others for some of the most basic parts of daily life.
That responsibility gives the book its subtitle, The Weight of the Keys.
The keys are literal. Administrators carry them.
The weight is something else.
Fajardo-Ponder's route to those keys was an unlikely one. He came from journalism, immigrated to the United States and entered healthcare without an elaborate plan to build a career in long-term care. The temporary turns became permanent ones. Medical records led somewhere else. Then another door opened. Then another.
Years later, the former reporter found himself with enough stories for a book.
There is a Filipino dimension to the story as well, although Fajardo-Ponder does not make ethnicity the book's organizing principle. Questions about aging parents, obligation and who should care for family members have particular resonance in Filipino culture, where caring for older relatives is often understood as a family responsibility rather than merely a healthcare decision.
Yet those questions are hardly exclusively Filipino.
Eventually, many families confront some version of them.
Can Mom still live alone?
Can Dad come home safely?
How much help can the family realistically provide?
What happens when love is abundant but time, money, physical ability or medical knowledge is not?
And if a nursing home becomes necessary, how does a family know whether it is good enough?
Fajardo-Ponder does not pretend his book can answer all of that.
Instead, after more than two decades inside nursing homes, he offers readers a chance to see the people behind those questions.
Perhaps that is the journalist in him.
He spent the first part of his professional life looking for stories. Then he changed careers and discovered that the stories had followed him. They were sitting in wheelchairs in hallways. Working night shifts. Waiting in administrator offices. Holding someone's hand. Trying to get strong enough to go home.
Eventually, he started writing them down.
And after all the regulations, inspections, meetings, crises and years spent carrying the keys, Fajardo-Ponder came back to the question that had followed him through much of his career:
Would you leave your parents here?
This time, he is asking the reader.
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Would You Leave Your Parents Here? The Weight of the Keys by Aldwin Fajardo-Ponder is published by Alduart Press. The eBook is available through BookBaby BookShop, with the hardcover edition forthcoming.
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