Looking after ailing mum paved way for carer job
Published on
29 May 2021
Published by
The Straits Times
SINGAPORE - When it was time to leave his first job of 40 years, Mr Ng Chee Yen did not hesitate.
In 2017, his 101-year-old mother became stricken with vascular dementia, diminishing her cognitive abilities and rendering her speechless overnight.
Mr Ng, 65, a bachelor who lived with her, decided to resign from his job at United Overseas Bank, where he started work as a teller at 21.
When he left the bank at age 61, nearing retirement, he was an assistant manager in the credit administration department.
"It was time for me to take care of her. I never thought otherwise. It's a natural instinct," he says. His elder brother and elder sister have families of their own and he wanted to be their mother's caregiver.
Thus, in his early 60s, he learnt a new suite of skills from scratch as his widowed mother, Madam Tan Siew Tin, had previously managed their household.
When she felt ill, he slept on the floor beside her bed in case she needed help during the night. He took her everywhere as far as possible, even to the barber when he needed a haircut. He learnt to cook dishes like pork leg with bee hoon from YouTube.
"I found joy in serving her," he says.
He rejected well-meaning suggestions to hire a domestic helper to care for Madam Tan, figuring that he knew his mother's temperament best.
She was hospitalised a few times in the last two years of her life. In 2019, she died at the age of 102 after a bout of pneumonia.
Three months after her death, a friend asked Mr Ng to consider a job in eldercare as he had been a full-time carer for his ailing mother for 20 months.
"While I was not young, neither did I feel old, and I couldn't see myself just sitting around," he says.
The caregiving, cooking and cleaning skills he had gained set him up for his next career as an eldercare worker.
Since September 2019, he has been a care professional with Homage, a firm that provides on-demand home and facility-based care to seniors and other adults.
His work entails escorting clients for medical appointments, helping them with daily tasks as well as cleaning and tidying their homes.
He enjoys caring for his elderly clients, even though he says some of their family members have hinted that he is too old for the job.
He does not miss banking, even though his current work is more taxing and pays about a sixth of his last drawn salary. Besides, he reckons his former line of work is closed to him at this age.
What he likes to do is reminisce about the good old days - how his mum liked to eat yong tau foo; how they went on regular overseas trips for 20 years until she became too frail in her early 90s.
"I love my mother very much. I miss her so much. I still think of her every single day," he says.
Source: The Straits Times © Singapore Press Holdings Limited. Reproduced with permission.
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