The Puzzle Master: A Long-Term Care Ombudsman Story

In my travels as a long-term care ombudsman, I’ve discovered something that exists in every facility I visit.

Every nursing home.

Every assisted living.

They all have a puzzle master.

That’s my term. I made it up.

Once, I asked a social worker, “Hey, where’s your puzzle master?”

She looked at me blankly.

“What’s that?”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s just a term I use.”

Every facility has a shelf filled with puzzles, boxes stacked on top of one another. Some are taped shut. Some are worn thin. Some have never been opened. And in every building, one resident eventually becomes their keeper.

The puzzle master is the person who takes responsibility.

They go through every puzzle.

They put them together.

They figure out which pieces are missing.

In some facilities, the puzzle master is given absolute authority. They’re allowed to decide which puzzles get thrown away when pieces are missing, and which ones should be replaced. In one place, a resident’s commitment was rewarded by letting them choose the new puzzles.

In other facilities, the rules are stricter. Puzzle masters aren’t allowed to throw anything away, even puzzles missing multiple pieces. Those are carefully boxed back up, labeled, and returned to the shelf.

The last puzzle master I met was analytical. He took me over to his puzzle table to show me his system.

When he finishes a puzzle, he takes a Sharpie.

On the box picture, he circles the exact missing piece. On top of the box, he writes how many pieces are gone.

I asked him, already knowing it was a foolish question, why he didn’t just throw away the puzzles with missing pieces. He looked at me like the answer should have been obvious.

“Because,” he said, “someone might want to put them together again.”

Puzzle masters aren’t just puzzle lovers. They’re meeting something more profound. They have a role.

They have a job.

They have a mission.

Puzzle masters take this work seriously. They spend hours every day on it.

I love talking to people in care facilities who have something that matters enough to get them up, because in places where almost nothing is theirs to decide, that choice still counts.

To protect resident privacy, identifying details in this story have been changed. The situations described reflect real issues encountered in long-term care.