Comfort Keeper Pat Weinhardt has been with the organization for about four years. She was named Comfort Keeper of the Year. JASON KINDIG/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story View and ORDER more photos.

For award-wining adult caregiver, the secret is simple: Treat clients like family

Date published: 8/10/2006

W HEN THE national adult-care company Pat Weinhardt works for here picked her out of 18,000 workers as its employee of the year, it was a proud moment.

It's a source of satisfaction both for the 59-year-old Spotsylvania County woman and for the rest of the staff at the Comfort Keepers of the greater Fredericksburg region.

But it didn't come as a surprise to the "clients" served by the big-hearted, hard-working woman who is proud of her roots back in Groundhog Hollow in southern West Virginia.

You see, the second this former Mary Washington Hospital employee passes through their doors, they're no longer her clients.

They're her family, with Weinhardt not just worried about mundane duties like cooking, grooming or assisting with other daily needs.

When she comes through the door, there's going to be laughing, there's going to be storytelling and, most of all, there's going to be light where darkness has often lingered too long.

"One of the simple things I always do with my people is to get them up and out, to Target, Big Lots, wherever," said Weinhardt, who's very happy about being named national Comfort Keeper of the Year. "And I like to do some home cooking for them. Too often, they've been eating TV dinners every night. They like to smell dinner cooking."

Lest you think that the one-time Department of Agriculture employee in Washington is being critical of the way families or relatives care for the elderly who become Comfort Keeper clients, that isn't the case.

"I'm often there because there aren't family members nearby, or because they have work and other demands that make it hard to always be there," said the West Virginia girl who grew up as one of 12 children, 10 of them girls. "That's why it's important to become their family."

Working in shifts that will run from a few hours a week to round-the-clock care, Weinhardt likes to share her own heritage with her extended family.

She'll read to them from books of Appalachian tales, recite her own poetry or tell stories from her childhood, about the way she and her siblings would scour hillsides near the "hollers" to fill 10-gallon buckets with blackberries that would sell for 50 cents.

Date published: 8/10/2006