Mike Blais
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A ROYAL CANADIAN "NEVER PASSES A FAULT"
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Take good care of your wives, lads, and they will take good care of you!
Standing by their men
No matter the infirmity, the wives know who their soldiers were - and why they fell in love with them
Nov 11, 2007 04:30 AM
Catherine Dunphy
Staff Reporter
They will come today, an hour or even 90 minutes early, aging men in medals and military garb, pride and memories pushing them a little straighter in their wheelchairs and walkers.
Remembrance Day at the veterans' wing at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on Bayview Ave. is a big deal. Hundreds attend the annual ceremony. Closed-circuit TV is set up in adjoining rooms for the overflow. In Warriors' Hall, where military artifacts – old photos, logbooks, model planes, spent ammunition – beckon inside mahogany display cases, there will be a band, dignitaries, speeches, then the laying of wreaths.
And tears will course down sunken, ancient faces as the soldiers remember names, faces, ranks – hell, the brand of cigarette they smoked – of buddies killed in the muddy battlefields of World War II and in the Korean War. No generic fallen comrades here; this pain is personal, and remembering is important.
Their wives know it. And they too remember. Not just today, but every day. They remember who their men once were and why they fell in love with them.
Age and infirmity have meant that the old soldiers now live here at Sunnybrook, apart from them. But these women are from a generation that took its wedding vows to heart, and so there are as many as 120 wives who spend most of their days visiting their husbands – even as they succumb to dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Their husbands' war has long ended; the wives are the ones now soldiering on.
"We don't know if they know we're their wives, or even who we are," says Isabel Bellis, 72. "But I couldn't not come here."
Her friends nod.
It's still a few weeks before Remembrance Day. They sit at the table in front of the display case in Warriors' Hall, where they always sit. They sit with their husbands, two by two, as if they were on a double date. Isabel has already been with Duke for several hours, Betty Rockley, 77, has fed and walked Jim, and Ella Evans has brought lunch from home for Trevor. As usual.
An energetic guitarist is singing Maritime songs while smiling volunteers serve tea and sugar-free strawberry wafers. Trevor Evans, 84 – who served as a Lancaster tail gunner in the RAF – is reliving an old wartime hurt involving his mother and his paycheque. He talks a lot right now, but he is alive only to his past, and Ella, 66, knows what lies ahead.
She sees it with her friends' husbands.
"You've got no illusions about what is going to happen," she says. "Our husbands are in different stages and each is demanding in his own right."
Nine years ago, Duke Bellis, 80, was in a locked ward. He wandered and lashed out, even at Isabel. He was so strong he pulled a phone out of the hospital wall.
Isabel Bellis demonstrates how bending back the thumb of his hand releases her husband's grip. It's a trick all the wives know – that and giving them tennis balls to hold to prevent them from grabbing staff.
A career soldier for 34 years with the Queen's Own, Duke had been a disciplined but loving father to their blended family of four children. In an earlier stage of his Alzheimer's, his wife would give him shoes to polish to military standards to keep him busy. Now, when he talks to Isabel, his eyes widen and he shakes his head, and she can't understand a word.
"But I know that he is telling me something," she says, and that is enough.
But now Duke is silent. He jabs a forefinger into his own middle distance.
Jim Rockley, who was in the Canadian Airborne, is slumped in his wheelchair, eyes closed. Betty's hand flutters from the arm of his chair to his knee.
She sighs. "Our husbands don't talk. They have long ago left us. I suppose I come here to still feel married."
Along with three others, the women try to get together once a month at Betty's condo. They call it their "whine and wine" nights. "You need a sense of humour for this," Ella Evans says.
About a decade ago, Hilda Harris decided the wives needed something more, as well. Her husband, Eric, now 90 and a British army vet, has been in Sunnybrook for 13 years. "When you come here you lose all your outside contacts," she says. "Everyone here is in the same situation – you are laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. I try to make it pleasant because I know."
So she organized a barbecue for a few of the wives. It poured rain, but just being with others who understood their world was enough for the women. The following year was a more extravagant affair – $10 for the chicken plate, $12 for the salmon, floating candles on the tables – to which she invited all the wives. More than 120 came.
Six years ago she organized a holiday luncheon for the widows; now all the women are invited to this annual event. On summer afternoons, she makes lemon tea outdoors for the wives. There's an annual out-of-town excursion for them, too. "You are fatigued when you go home from here," she says. "The wives can relax with no husbands to worry about. They really have fun."
For one day.
Ella Melenson, 84, has been up all night. The hospital called minutes after she walked into her east-end condo saying her husband, Tracy, 93, had taken a turn. She phoned Wheel Trans, rode right back and stayed the night, despite still being weak from the stroke she suffered at Sunnybrook while visiting Tracy just four months ago.
"I knew he would try to pull out his (IV), tubes so I stayed there and held his hand," she recalls. "The staff were wonderful. A nurse brought me a blanket."
As she walks with her cane through Warriors' Hall the next morning to get some clothes from Tracy's room, other wives ask about his health, and hers.
"It's hard," she tells them, "but I'm standing up. Don't know for how long though."
Tracy Melansen dies four days later. They've been married 64 years. Her name was tattooed on his forearm.
The hospital intercom sounds as Betty Rockley and Isabel Bellis have their morning coffee in the cafeteria. It's a Code Blue. Both women stop, then relax. It's not at either of their husbands' wards. "You never know," says Betty.
In September, Jim had a medical crisis. It was touch and go. Betty phoned Isabel at 6:30 Sunday morning. "Next thing I know, she and Ella drove in," she says. "They were there. Like that."
They stayed with her, taking turns, for the next four days.
"They were always going to be there," says Betty. "You just know they're going to be there.
Isabel smiles. "We're in this together," she says.
`He is my husband. I need him, want him'
"You never know when you walk in what is waiting for you," says Betty Rockley. Her husband is slumped to one side, clutching the rail of his hospital bed with both hands. He grabs her hand as she tries to straighten him.
"You're like an octopus. Can I have my good morning kiss?" She breaks his hold and slips him a tennis ball as she pecks his cheek. "Thank you."
She needs a nurse and an automated lifting devise to get him back in position.
Once a vice-president of human resources in a management consulting firm, Jim Rockley, 82, now suffers from a form of Alzheimer's that attacks both the body and mind.
As the dementia has eroded his mental faculties, he has retreated into a world of mute stillness. There is a look of perpetual worry on his smooth face, which does not light up when she enters his room.
On the other hand, his eyes never leave her when she is with him.
"He is my husband," she says, slipping his feet into his running shoes.
"I need him, want him, and just because he's not the same as when I married him doesn't mean I love him less."
She was a widow and he was divorced when they met on a blind lunch date. He walked her back to her office, then called to say thank you, and she thought he was the most courteous of men.
She still thinks so.
They married in '81 and had 20 good years together.
"Jim has gone through so many metamorphoses," she says, feeding him spoonfuls of puréed chicken a la king, checking to make sure he swallows his food. He stares back. "Good thing I don't mind you staring," she says to him, gently, teasing. "You do that a lot. You trying to remember what I look like? As if you could forget."
She takes him out of his room every day – outside, if weather permits, and then to Warriors' Hall, where they sit with friends. Betty acknowledges it's not much of a life for him or for her, but when she took her wedding vows, she agreed to forsake all others.
"To me that's a profound statement. To me the person you marry becomes paramount."
– Catherine Dunphy
The wives `They were good times'
Art Plumb died the last day of February in 2006, yet his widow, Wendy, still visits Sunnybrook three days a week. She has a friend there, a 94-year-old man who paints and plays piano for the vets in Warriors' Hall.
But that's not the only thing drawing her back. This is where her husband thrived for 19 happy years.
"Moving to Sunnybrook was the best thing that happened to him," says Wendy, 68. "He used to say he had more recognition here than anywhere."
Diagnosed at 30 with multiple sclerosis, Art, who served in the Lincoln and Wellington Regiment, was in a wheelchair by 44. The only time she ever saw him stand almost unaided was at their 1965 wedding, when he leaned against the front pew to say his vows.
When he came to Sunnybrook he announced, "We came here to live, not to die."
Within a year, he was president of the veteran and community residents' council. Art and Wendy were a team; they went to receptions, galas. She watched as he was presented to a Norwegian princess during the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
She helped him write letters on the council's behalf; she used to sit with him in Sunny's, the cafeteria, as he chatted with a stream of passers-by.
She beamed from the audience when he spoke at a Remembrance Day service, the first vet to do so.
She was just 47, the youngest spouse in his wing, when Art moved to Sunnybrook. She felt different from the other wives. As he weakened, their visits at Sunnybrook were their only time together, and she grew more comfortable there.
"Sunnybrook is still home," she says now. "I can't stay away from it."
– C.D.
The wives `Life has changed completely'
Beryl Williams lives in the Beach. Her husband lives an hour's bus and streetcar ride away – that's on a good day – at Sunnybrook. But she knows she is one of the lucky wives.
Harry Williams is always in the hallway outside the elevator doors waiting for her.
Usually he's already read the paper, played the mental aerobics activity, won the sports and current events quiz, done some woodworking, maybe even hosted a visitor – someone from his running club, a patient from the Danforth Ave. chiropractic clinic he ran until he was 78, or a player from one of the hockey teams he coached for 35 years. "He gets lots of visitors," Beryl says.
At 87, after a stroke so devastating that Sunnybrook doctors call him "the miracle," only his body has slowed.
They met in Britain at a village dance. Beryl was being hassled by a tall, drunk Canadian officer whom Harry, a soldier in Toronto's Queen's Own Rifles, shoved on the chest and told to get lost. "Shoulda been court martialled," he says.
They were married in 1943; their life together was busy from the beginning. They danced together, worked together, ran together and raised a son and daughter together. That stopped when Harry moved to Sunnybrook more than six years ago.
"Life has changed completely," Beryl says.
At Sunnybrook she stays close but in the background while he does his ceramics and woodworking.
At home, she has lost touch with friends she used to see at a local aerobics class. She hasn't learned Spanish, brushed up on her conversational French or worked in a local literacy program, as she once had planned, but neither has she any complaints.
"I like being with him."
– C.D.
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