Category: Shrine

Notes From the Shrine: Visit with Your Dad

~ johnbrandall

by Ray Wisdom

I had called the Shrine the day before to make sure there wouldn't be an issue with my visiting. The person I spoke with was lovely and gave me very detailed directions on how to get to the memory care facility.

As I was driving around the main building, I had this lightning bolt-type remembrance of visiting the exact same place when my grandpa was there. It was eerie. I rationally knew it wa =s the same place, but I guess that memory was buried pretty deep. The last time I saw him, he didn't remember who I was. He thought my mom was his wife. It was all so sad. I guess I had repressed it. 

After I was buzzed into the building, the woman at the front desk said that your dad was in B1, and as I turned to go down the hallway, your mom had just entered at the other end. When she saw me, she stopped-short, like she had seen a ghost. She recognized me immediately and was so happy. She said 'Ray, is that you? What are you doing here?' The best way I can describe her reaction was that she was both dumbfounded, with a look of both disbelief and happiness on her face. She was getting ready to leave, but offered to take me back to see your dad. 

We went into the room and your dad was watching CNBC (or one of those channels. It was the one with the guy who rolls up his sleeves and gives financial advice. Jim Cramer?) on the TV. Your mom went to his side and said 'Brian, you have a visitor'. Your dad looked at me and I said 'Carpe Diem, Mr. Randall. It's Ray.' He looked at me and said 'Ray'. 

Your mom then asked if he had just said something and I told her that he said my name. It was then that she told me about his recent issues with swallowing and speaking and how she had to call for hospice care. That he had only started verbally communicating again that day. He looked at your mom and said 'who called hospice?' She said she had. He then continued to watch TV. 

Your mom stayed for about 10 more minutes and we chatted. She relayed how hard it has been for her. How she visits most days. She started crying as she told me this and then reiterated how happy she was that I was visiting. She said I could pop by the house any time I wanted. If she wasn't there, she was probably visiting your dad. I told her that I had started writing a letter to her, but I couldn't find the words. We had a long hug and I told her that I was happy to have run into her. I let her know that she could leave and I would stay with your dad for a while.

After your mom left, I pulled up a chair and sat next to your dad. He was watching TV and would occasionally look over at me. There wasn't much that would lead me to think he recognized me. I asked if he still followed the market and he said 'everyday'. I asked if he still followed any other news but he didn't respond...


Read Ray's full account here...

Notes from The Shrine, Late May 2024

~ johnbrandall

The other thing that my dad said that surprised me because of the cognizance it showed was his identifying an old towel I had grabbed from out of the car in order to wipe down the chair I wanted to sit in.

"Looks like one of our old towels," he said.

It took me a moment to process what he had said but he was correct. It's an old Ralph Lauren beige hand towel from what is now his old house, Rockingham. The towel is about a third of the size of a bath owl, much larger than a square washcloth. Something like a foot by two feet.

That towel must be thirty years old, which is part of why I like them so much. They're useful. Wiping, drying, cleaning up, covering up. They can serve as your only towel if you happen to— Sneeeeeze!!! My dad rips off one of his patented loud sneezes and the pen jolts in my hand, skittering across the page. My dad is still one of the loudest sneezers around.

"Have any memorable meals lately?" I ask him.

"Fish with tartar sauce, two tartars," he tells me.

"Last night?"

"That could have been."

He's sharper today, no doubt. Down the road I could see myself working here. I'd volunteer or maybe take a part-time job. If they wanted another groundskeeper on staff who would also work as a porter, transporting Dammert residents to lunch and back. I'd fill in this pock-marked concrete. Do some hedge trimming. Sweeping...


Read the rest of this post here...

The Days of Bob and Jack

~ johnbrandall

We go to lunch. Bob's at the lunch table.

"I look around at these two guys," he says, "And I wonder, 'Are they ever gonna be included in something as big as this?'"

The food arrives and Bob looks my way.

"I don't really want this," he says, and starts laughing.

I take this opportunity to ask him about his tattoo. Was it from his military days? He doesn't answer the question. It's the only time he's ever seemed to evade a question, or appearing to do so. He starts talking about his son fixing up houses. "They were small hands but many," he says. Then, "That's one thing I like about this place. It's clean."

I listen to lunch room sounds. One of the CNAs is encouraging one of three Helens (in this case, the mayor's daughter) to eat her food. Helen replies in her soft-spoken manner, "I'd better not. I don't want to throw up here. Everyone will look at me." The only thing she eats is the ice cream.

Then, a commotion from out in the hall, a racket.

"What the...?!" Bob exclaims. "It sounded like about two or three horses or something." Then he sneezes. "Oooh, that one came out fast," he says.

Bob ate the garlic bread, a little bit of pasta, and the ice cream. "Ice cream's ice cream," he says. "But this is pretty good."

I went over to the main dining room and got a plate of my own. Pizza spaghetti they call it. I ate everything on the plate save one pepperoni. My dad ate everything except one slice of zucchini. It's the Patsy Cline CD playing today. Bob knows these lyrics, some of them. He sings along. When the last song on the CD stops playing he says, "So there."

Genevieve, the 98-year-old woman hunched over in her usual windbreaker outfit makes her way out by taking tiny steps with her dangling wheelchair feet, quiet as a cloud except when she catches one of the CNAs on her way out and asks for a Honey Nut Cheerios to go.

"We enjoyed lunch with you, Bob," my dad tells his lunch mate.

"When was that?" asks Bob.

"Today," says dad.

"Oh, ha. Ha ha. Thank you, thank you very much," says Bob.

But we don't get going just yet. It's quiet now in the lunch room. The sound of wind chimes comes from outside, past the glass. My dad is starting to doze off. Bob is picking at his teeth, wiping clean the glasses he lost for a few days last week.

"I think I'm gonna go downstairs," Bob says. "I don't know if I've been down there. I thought I had. I'll probably make a new, or I don't know. As far as I knew, we hadn't used that, or we wished it away. I'm goin' downstairs. Anybody left? Hello, hello. I'm goin' down..."


Further Notes from the Shrine, from March and April 2024, click here for the full post ...

Mouse Lady

~ johnbrandall

I had another encounter with the mouse lady. Yesterday. I didn't realize it was her; that's how tired I was.

My dad and I were sitting outside, near the St. Francis Center entrance. A woman came out very straight-backed, serious air. She sat down and said, "I just wanted to see who was out here."

And we said, "OK, yeah."

She said, "It's not because I'm nosy. It's because I'm blind."

Blind? Hmmm. She didn't strike me as having a problem with her sight. She had no cane, no walking stick, no walker, nothing. She didn't reach about to feel for the chair when sitting down. I thought she looked familiar but I've been coming here long enough to where most of the people look familiar, because they are.

She remarked on how nice a day we were having, the weather. She asked where we were from. Not from St. Francis, she observed. And now I know where she was coming from, what she was getting at. She's a wasp. I'm a wasp. Her tendency is also mine. To be curious to a fault. To gate-keep.

"My dad's in Dammert," I told her. "We like to come out here for the view."

Then she started talking about wanting to see some of the area cleared. The vines, their tangle, the brush. This is the area you see when you look out, west, southwest, from the St. Francis Center entrance. My dad would start calling it Porcupine Hill. Why, I don't know. And he wasn't calling it Porcupine Hill yet. This was only April of 2024...


Click here to read the full post...

Notes from The Shrine 3: Let’s All Sing Some Songs

~ johnbrandall

We are sitting in the lunch room.  Me, my dad, Bob, Father V.  We are all drinking coffee. Bob is singing along with the music that’s playing.  Patsy Cline.  He is not quite singing the words but he is howling, slow crooning, lamenting.  

The song is “Baby, Baby.”  Once it ends he says, “Yeah!  Write something else!”

Lunch is grilled cheese, tomato soup, fries, and applesauce.  Nothing wrong with that.  My dad is eating well. Bob gets an extra sandwich but he hasn't gotten through the first one yet. It's a warm nursing home lunch room now gone quiet except for Patsy Cline singing “Always” one afternoon before the approach of some very bad weather.

The song ends and Bob exclaims, “Yes, indeed!”

Then he makes to get up from the table.  “Well, the wife is wonderin’ where I’m at,” he says, and my dad laughs.  

“I know she does,” Bob says, trailing off.  He doesn’t get up after all, stays seated.  He sits with his back to the wall, looking toward the wall of windows on the west-facing side of the lunchroom.  Bob's problem is his sight.  He can still get around just fine, using his walker, but his vision is failing.

“Look at the clouds all the way out,” he says, “I think they’re going to be there a while.  I think we played football together...”


Read the full journal entry here...

Notes from The Shrine 2: Like It or Lump It

~ johnbrandall

Bob was talking today.  We were at the lunch table and I was telling my dad about getting a dentist appointment set up for him.

“What’d you say about a weapon?” asked Bob.  

I wasn’t sure what he might have heard so I said my dad and I were talking about teeth.  Then I was telling dad about taking mom back to the dealer so she could pick up her car once it had been serviced.  New brakes.  I guess it really doesn’t take that long.

Bob mused on driving, which he said he hadn’t been doing “for about a year now.”  I asked him what kind of car he had.  Or maybe, I wondered aloud, did he have a truck.  He laughed at that idea.

“No,” he said, he never had a truck.  “But who knows once the kids get their foot in there.”

“You never had a truck as part of your job?” I asked.  “Getting up on those poles?”

“That job,” he answered, “was a real pain in the ass.”

Bob was a lineman.  He worked for what then was called Union Electric.  He has spoken fondly about his job in prior conversations so I took this expression of displeasure as a reference to one specific job, some beef or failure or disappointment he must have had out in the field one week...


Click here for the full journal entry...

Notes from The Shrine 1 

~ johnbrandall

Early May 2024

My dad slowly wheeling himself away, his feet pulling, scraping along.

“Yeah, he walked him,” says a woman with glasses, another resident.  “We were down in our house.”

Mass is on the TV, in the common room of this nursing home.  Lunchmate Bob is singing along with the hymn, just the notes.

“Soft smell, the all cough coughs,” says the woman with glasses.  I do not remember her ever saying anything before.  But I do recognize her, she must eat in the assisted dining room.

“They were asking for the Christmas Day,” she says.  “I never heard that one before. Least they’ll give it to the other Christmas.  Have fun.  We had a little.”

She trails off.  I can’t follow the meaning of her words but hers is a musical nonsense language.  Lyrical and sporadic, like a strange bird.

“I throw ye in the class now!”

“Hmm?” asks Bob in reply, thinking maybe she is talking to him.

Lillian, another resident, rocks back and forth in her wheelchair.  She’s spoken to me a few times, thinks maybe I am one of hers.  A lunch will be served in the main Dammert dining room, Dammert being the name of this place, this wing of the retirement community, the last stop on the route, the end of the line.

Bob has gotten an early start on his lunch.  Someone has gotten him a bag of cookies.  Maybe his wife, who lives over in the apartments, independent.  

“I call on the on-derin,” says the woman with glasses.  

“Yeah, hmmm,” says Bob, “Mm-hmm.”

She holds her hands tight, clenched and clawed, thumb to index finger, pill-rolling.

“Hmm?” says Bob, “I can’t hear you.”

The Mayor’s mom is also a resident here.  Helen.  She fell recently, landed on her head.  She looks pretty beat up, a gash on her forehead, dark red, purple, dried blood.

“Thank you,” says Bob.  

Later, at lunch, he turns to me and holds up just the top half of a hamburger bun.  

“This is nothin but bread,” he says, and I can’t disagree.

For most of this year, I have been visiting my dad at a nursing home near Belleville, IL. Dammert, the place he's in, is the skilled care wing of a retirement community at Our Lady of the Snows Shrine. I have kept a journal during many of these visits. It is time for me to begin to type up these Shrine journals. They will not be posted in chronological order. I didn't take many photos early on so some of the photos might be redundant.