Angels

It's easy to be cynical about a story that involves mysterious night time visitors who don't frighten an old man living alone, who looks forward to their regular presence. Disbelieving becomes a little more difficult when a story unfolds over a period of several weeks, through first-hand accounts from people who are personally involved. Maybe a bit more difficult when those people are the educated sort you'd expect to be serious doubters.

I heard this story from a number of home health nurses as it was happening, not years after the fact. I have a tremendous admiration for nurses and health aides who go into the homes of sick and infirm people, enabling them to avoid hospitalization or confinement in a nursing home. Home health workers are dedicated, caring people, who like their work. What happened around old Thomas Johnson, one of the patients of a local home health service, had nurses begging to be included in visits to his house.

He was in his early eighties, and for years Tom had enjoyed remarkably good health. When it became necessary to place Alice, his wife of over sixty years in a long-term care facility, the old man walked to the nursing home twice a day. He was there when Alice woke, and helped feed her breakfast. He'd come back in time to assist with dinner. Weather didn't stop him, though if it was bitter cold, or if rain fell from dismal gray clouds, Tom allowed his unmarried daughter Ruby to drive him to his Alice.

When Tom's health began to deteriorate, and he was no longer able to live with complete independence, he didn't easily tolerate the intrusion of others into his life. But before long he stopped complaining about the home health aide who came to do light housekeeping and cook simple meals. Still, he didn't much care for the nurses who came every other day to check his vitals, and to assure themselves he could continue living alone.

And he _never_ accepted the presence of others when it was time for bed. He didn't even allow his own children to stay to tuck him in, though everyone would have felt better if he'd have allowed an aide or a daughter to help him retire for the evening. In one of the family conferences, held to discuss his situation, it was decided that as long as Tom was taking care of himself, everyone would respect his wishes, and leave his house by dark.

When Tom began complaining about "them damn nurses" who weren't living up to their promises, everyone involved wondered if it was time to think about ‘round the clock care for the old man. The nurses and aides assured Tom that none of them were coming into his house at night, but he accused them of lying. He demanded they return the key they'd obviously stolen, said he wanted to be left alone of an evening. "You all want to treat me like a baby that can't find his own bed," Tom told them. "And I won't have it."

He complained so loudly and so bitterly to his daughters they developed a suspicion someone in the health care team wasn't being quite honest.. It was only after seeing the meticulous records of nurses' visits and the hours home health staffers spent in their father's house that Ruby, Kate and Marge sadly concluded the old man was delusional, and worried that continued hallucinations might mean sending him to a nursing home.

Then, as quickly as it developed, Tom's hostility evaporated. He even apologized to Joanie Martin, one of his nurses, for having accused Joanie and the others of imposing unwanted and unwelcome attentions at night. "I figured out them women coming in here ain't nurses," he said. "They're angels."

"How do you know they're angels?" Joanie pressed, listening carefully, so as to accurately chart this new fantasy from her patient.

"It took me a while to work it out," Tom admitted. "But when I started fastening the security chain when you all left of an evening, and _still_ had people coming in here, it made me wonder how anybody could slip them chains off to come in and fasten 'em back when they left."

"That would be pretty difficult," Joanie said.

Tom snorted. "Be more than difficult," he told her. "You'd have to have an arm no bigger around than a broomstick to fasten that chain back when you left." He grinned knowingly. "I been looking at everybody that comes in and out of here. Ain't a one of you all that skinny."

The old man said he'd mistaken the white robes work by his evening visitors for nursing uniforms, and confessed he'd come to appreciate the attentions of the women who came when he was alone in the house. They helped him into his bed, and sang to him till he went to sleep. Tom confessed he'd miss them, if they ever stopped coming. "No offense to you all," he told Joanie Martin. "But them others treat me just as kind as my own mother would."

Joanie made the appropriate notes in Tom Johnson's chart, and wasn't too surprised when Sabrina Johnson, one of the health aides, came to her with another story from the old man. "He told me he _knows_ they're angels now, because last night one of them brought his boy Frankie for a visit." Sabrina looked at Joanie, a little puzzled. "I didn't know any of his children were named Frankie. I thought Tom and Alice only had daughters."

Next time Joanie was alone with Ruby Johnson, she asked the woman if she had any idea who "Frankie" might be. Ruby stared, open-mouthed, at Joanie a long time. "Why're you asking about Frankie?"

Joanie told Ruby her father was saying one of his evening visitors had brought someone named Frankie to see him.

"Frankie was my little brother," Ruby said after a long silence. "He died a long them ago, back before World War II." Tears welled in the daughter's eyes. "I was nine when Frankie got scarlet fever. When he died I thought it was gonna kill Daddy before it was over with."

After claiming Frankie had been brought to him, Tom Johnson didn't seem able to stop talking about his "angels." Joanie Martin told some of the other nurses about it, and before long she was besieged by requests from co-workers wanting to hear the old man's stories. Subsequently, several told me Tom was entirely convincing when he talked about his night time company. "He didn't sound like someone describing delusions," one of the nurses said. "Whatever he was seeing, whatever was going on in that house after we left, it was making him happy, even while he was getting sicker, and sicker."

Tom _was_ failing, and quickly. Before long he cut his trips to see Alice at the care facility to a single daily visit, and he no longer walked, but rode in one of his daughters' cars. Soon even that was too much for the old man to do every day. As he weakened, concerns were again raised about his ability to get himself to bed at night, but he remained adamant about not having anyone else in the house after dark. The angels would take care of him, he said. And the medical people reluctantly agreed with Tom's children: they wouldn't intervene until it was absolutely necessary.

The inevitable came about two months after Tom Johnson began talking about his angels. The on-call home health nurse was summoned to the house one morning when Tom's daughter couldn't get her father to wake up. Within a couple hours of the nurse's arrival at the house, the old man took a final long breath, and died.

Even before Tom's body was moved from his house to the mortuary, his daughters held a quick conference to decide what, if anything, they'd tell their mother about what had happened. It didn't take long for them to agree they wouldn't say anything to Alice, for fear the shock would cause even more problems. As it happened, they didn't need to tell her.

Tom died on a Tuesday. That afternoon, Ruby took it on herself to visit Alice in the nursing home, telling her sisters she was sure she could hide her grief from their mother. Later, meeting the sisters at the nursing home to make arrangements, Ruby expressed confidence she'd fooled their mother. "Mama didn't bat an eye when I told her Daddy didn't come with me only because he had a bad cold," Ruby told her sisters.

Wednesday morning, a call from the nursing home made Ruby's notions of fooling her mother meaningless. Alice Johnson had always been a model patient at the care facility, never causing problems, and was a very easy lady to care for. But four different times, Tuesday night, she'd been found wandering the halls of the building, confused about where she was, but certain about where she wanted to go, _needed_ to go.

"I got to get out of this place," she told the nurses who over and over escorted her back to bed.

"Why?" one of the nurses asked, the second time they found Alice up and about. "It's cold outside, Alice. Why do you want to go out in that?"

"Tom's out there," she told them. "He's been there all night, motioning to me. And I got to go if he wants me to come with him."

Ruby told the nursing home she'd be there right away, but though it was less than a five minute drive, by the time she arrived her mother'd slipped into a coma. She never woke up, and passed away within forty eight hours.

Alice and tom Johnson shared over sixty years together, and at the end, shared the same funeral service. I like to think Tom, who once lifted her over the threshold of their new home, carried Alice to a much finer home at the end.