The best part of Patty Cordell’s job is feeling like she has 64 grandparents under her roof at any given time.

The worst part of her job is when one of those surrogate grandparents dies.

Cordell, 47, is the executive director of Prestige Assisted Living at Kalispell, a position she says is “absolutely” her dream job.

“I get to work with seniors and create a fun and great home environment,” she said.

While Prestige Assisted Living is part of a larger corporation, Cordell nevertheless has the ability to introduce new activities and programs and hire staffers who help her create a friendly, home-like atmosphere.

“I have a lot of autonomy,” she said. “They [the corporate arm of the company] trust me and I get to put my thumbprint on this place.”

A happy hour every Friday is one of the best-attended events she set up, and an annual prom for the residents — complete with the selection of a prom king and queen — is another fun activity.

Cordell’s duties as an administrator go well beyond the work day.

“It’s really 24/7. I’m on call all the time,” she said. “Things happen on weekends and it’s hard not to swing by.”

Choosing staffers who have the same passion for caregiving has enabled Cordell to assemble what she calls a “wonderful, confident team.

“A big part of my job is to recognize those who have the knack, that calling [for caregiving] and making them feel a part of a bigger family,” she said.

Cordell’s caregiving abilities became evident to her family when she was still a teenager in high school. She grew up in Richland, Washington, where both of her parents were engineers at the Hanford nuclear production complex.

When Cordell’s grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease, her parents moved her grandmother from South Carolina to their Washington home.

“I spent a lot of time with her,” Cordell recalled. “I was the only who could get her to bathe or eat” and partake in other daily activities.

Cordell was extremely close with her maternal grandparents, who lived across the country in Virginia. She would visit them every summer. Luckily, her paternal grandmother lived just across the fence in the same community.

“My grandparents were super important to me. I really loved them. I wrote letters to them my whole life,” she said.

Cordell didn’t immediately consider a career in long-term nursing care, though, and instead opted for a degree in speech and hearing science from the University of Washington. While she was in college, she got a job as a nurse’s aide and loved it. She also worked in home health care during her college days and began to realize “this is what I need to do.”

Her first job out of college was a marketing director position with a nursing home in Seattle, and that solidified her career change. She went back to school at Wenatchee Valley College and earned her nursing degree.

When she moved to the Flathead Valley, she worked as a registered nurse at North Valley Extended Care in Whitefish until that facility closed, then spent five years at Brendan House in Kalispell before interviewing for the executive director position at Prestige Assisted Living nine years ago.

It’s a job not everyone is cut out to do. Empathy has to come naturally, and Cordell has an abundance of it.

“You’re dealing with people’s losses [related to aging] and helping them through the process,” she explained. Many of the residents have lost their spouses or close friends or have had to give up their longtime homes.

It’s difficult when a resident dies, Cordell said, but she’s pragmatic in her approach to life and death.

“For the most part they’ve lived a long, wonderful life,” she said. “We help them leave this world in the best possible way.”

Cordell is now challenged with dealing with Alzheimer’s once again as her mother, still in Washington, struggles with the long, slow slide of dementia that is the hallmark of that disease. Her father still cares at home for her mother but has hired a caregiver to give him some time away from shouldering the load. Cordell and her sister in Seattle also help out when they can.

“I see it now from a family member point of view,” she said. “I can empathize.”

Cordell’s sons, Colin, a Glacier High School senior and gifted percussionist, and Morgan, a Glacier sophomore and honor student, have spent copious amounts of time at their mother’s workplaces since they were babies, she said.

“They’ve spent all their Halloweens here,” she said. Morgan helps out at Prestige’s many parties and Colin plays the steel drum for the center’s summer luau.

Cordell expects to finish out her career at Prestige Assisted Living.

“This is home,” she said.

Because her grandmother and mother developed Alzheimer’s at a relatively early age, Cordell confided that she worries she may one day get the progressive brain disease, too. A family history of the disease is a risk factor.

That’s why she chooses to live each day to the fullest.

“I’m not going to postpone joy at all,” she said. “It [Alzheimer’s] could be my fate.”

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.