“Poor Bernie.”
Rev. Thomas J. Curley was recalling a friendship of nearly 70 years. He had met Bernard O’Halloran during the Depression when they were gangly teenagers, caddies at Glenview Park and Ridgemoor Golf Courses.
“I still play nine holes as often as I can,” said the 83-year-old priest. “It’s an easy course, thank the Lord. I use a cart, and I don’t get far from it.”
Bernard’s golfing days are over. Six years ago, he suffered the first of a series of strokes that have left him confined to a wheelchair. At 82, he lives in a nursing home in Niles only a few miles from the two courses he worked at so long ago.
An attendant wheeled him into the lobby of the St. Benedict Home, a 99-resident, skilled-care facility owned and operated by Catholic Charities of Chicago. As part of his therapy, Bernard is supposed to push himself along in the wheelchair. But he is painfully slow–frequently stopping, seeming to lose track of where he is going. Often, when the rehab nurses aren’t watching, someone gives Bernard a push.
He is a visual anomaly, a big guy, 240 pounds, a great contrast to the mostly frail- and shrunken-looking men and women among whom he lives. He looks as though he could just grip the armrests of the wheelchair, push himself up and take off walking. Indeed, he sometimes claims he can walk. But he never does.
He enjoys chatting, especially about the old days. He volunteered that he was a Catholic Youth Organization boxer in his teens and assessed his prowess with a smile and a shrug:
“I won some. I lost some.”
At times, in the middle of a sentence, he will just stop, as though he has lost something–energy, interest, whatever–that he needs to continue. Those disconnections seem to echo what his eldest son said about how Bernard had settled into a sedentary life after retirement: “He sort of sat down and didn’t get up again.”
Like most mornings, Bernard’s destination was the chapel. One or another of the retired resident priests at St. Benedict offers mass there daily, and Bernard, continuing a habit established in boyhood, attends and receives communion. He sits at the back of the chapel, off to one side, establishing a distance between himself and the other residents.
“You can tell Bernard sees his stay here as transitional,” said Debbie O’Malley, director of residential services at the home. “There’s not a lot in his room, just a TV and some personal items.”
Bernard had been in nursing homes before. Medicare will pay for a limited time placement in a home directly following a hospital stay, and most nursing-home admissions are, in fact, short-term. Once, when he found himself in a home he particularly disliked, Bernard said to his son John, “You’re a lawyer. Get me out of here,” as though he was there only because of some legal technicality.
Bernard has been losing the rosaries his wife gives him, even one of the large ones that nuns carry. At mass this day, he holds an obvious orphan, a plastic rosary with pink beads and a white crucifix. The beads move through his hand, dwarfed by it. His lips shape silent prayers.
After mass, Bernard doesn’t like to linger in the lobby. He complains that it’s too noisy. Other residents enjoy gathering there, though, to sit and watch the tiny, colorful finches hop and flit in their huge glass cage. Bernard anxiously stops an administrator leaving her office and asks the same question he asks every day, sometimes several times a day:
“Is she coming?”
Five afternoons each week, Agnes, Bernard’s 81-year-old wife, answers that question by turning her car off Touhy Avenue, up the driveway and into the St. Benedict parking lot, having driven over from their Wilmette home, where in recent years she had struggled to care for Bernard.
Their reunions seem unremarkable. She chats quietly and brushes his hair. He nods and speaks a little. But the minute he sees her, his anxiousness is erased. Now that he is surrounded by strangers, she is a lifeline, a comforting connection to who he was.
“Most of our families are very good about supporting the resident they have here, but she’s top of the line,” O’Malley said. “You could tell from the very beginning that they were a team. When they’re together, you can just see she’s spent a lifetime loving this man.”
`For better or for worse’
Bernard O’Halloran and Agnes McCarthy said their wedding vows more than 60 years ago, paying scant attention to the dark side of “for better or for worse” or “in sickness and in health.” Over the decades, they weathered the ups and downs that most marriages see, but now a wrenching change has taken place. They are apart. That fact has hit their lives like a stone hitting the surface of a pond, its effects spreading out and out, reaching into the smallest crannies of their days and nights.
Early in November last year, Bernard got sick with what turned out to be pneumonia. By Nov. 5, he was so ill that Agnes called the paramedics, who took him to Evanston Hospital. While he was being treated, Agnes also came down with pneumonia. Earlier, she had had a hernia, perhaps a result of the great physical exertion the diminutive woman had to put forth in caring for her extra-large husband.
Their son Jim said he knew that something needed to be done soon when he was in town on a visit and watched one morning as his mother tried to get Bernard out of the rented hospital bed set up in the den on the first floor.
“She climbed up on the bed and worked her way behind him a little bit at a time,” he said, “and then she pushed and pushed to get him up.”
Said son John: “Dad’s dad took care of his wife at home until she died. She had Alzheimer’s. When my grandfather went into a nursing home, I remember some of us asked why he couldn’t be cared for at home. Now we know.”
“It’s usually the case that families put off placement longer than they need to,” O’Malley said. “It’s such a tough decision to come to. The breaking point might be feeling that a visiting nurse is an intruder–maybe Mom has fired six of them. Or it might be repeated falling. The families seem to need to justify to me why they need to do the placement. They need to say, `We’ve tried this and that, and nothing is working.’ I give out the Kleenex.
“When Bernard came in, I actually was more worried about Agnes. She had stretched herself to the limit. She was stressed, had pneumonia, was dealing with guilt, loneliness. She seemed scattered, so lost.”
Bernard was told that because Mom was sick, he would have to go to a nursing home when he was discharged from the hospital. He agreed. He was also told that if he could get his mobility back so that he could walk and be easier to care for, he could go home.
On Nov. 11, Bernard was admitted to St. Benedict.
“It’s such a severance in your life, such loneliness for each of us,” Agnes said. “It seems so strange not having him at home to talk with. I wish you could bring back the old days, but you can’t. I don’t look back, though; that just makes you sad. I set a pattern for myself to live normally.”
That pattern includes morning exercises, grocery shopping and other chores, and the visits to Bernard and to two of her sisters who live nearby. She has friends in the Wilmette neighborhood that has been home for 40 years. She or they will drop in to talk, but no bridge. “I never liked the game,” she said. “All the arguing and carrying on over what –cards?”
She said she has found “a certain amount of peace in being alone. That, of course, comes with the knowledge that Bern is secure, that someone is with him.”
In the evenings, she makes herself a drink, bourbon and 7-Up with a lemon twist and lots of ice. She sits in the room that, a little more than a year ago, housed Bernard’s hospital bed but is a den once again. She watches the nightly news on television and slowly sips her cocktail. Then, having cooked earlier, making enough food for three meals and freezing two, she sits down to a good dinner.
“Every night,” she said, “I pray for him.”
She adheres fairly rigidly to the pattern of doing certain things at certain times, believing that structure not only will keep her body and mind healthy but will hold loneliness at bay. Sometimes, however, it sneaks up on her.
She turned on a Perry Como Christmas in Ireland TV special recently. While watching it, she suddenly noticed that tears were running down her cheeks.
Sundaes and dancing
“Do I remember Agnes McCarthy?” Curley said. “I went out with Aggie McCarthy, though I went out more with her sister.” He recalled Agnes (with whom he still chats on the phone from time to time) as a beauty and a dynamo. She would organize dances at the church, St. Philomena, near Armitage Avenue and Pulaski Road, that both she and Curley attended.
“I’d take her to those dances,” Curley said, “and she’d dance with every guy in the place. When I was studying at the seminary, though, I lost track of the McCarthy family.”
A visitor said, “Well, that happens.” The elderly priest held up one hand and bent forward to emphasize what he was about to say. “You have to understand; as a seminarian, the whole point was to stay away from the McCarthy girls.”
Friends introduced Agnes and Bernard when she was 15 and he was 16. They were at a party for a boy (he was Norwegian and went to public school, Agnes recalled) who had been hospitalized after being injured in a high school football game.
“I heard that Bern was in Quigley Seminary then,” Agnes said, “so I didn’t pay any attention to him.” Years later, after Bernard had left the seminary, they met again at a Lions Club dance on North Avenue. At the end of the evening, he asked to walk her home. She teasingly said no, then agreed. Soon, they were dating, traveling all over the city to find the best dances, the best bands.
“It was nothing then to see kids on the subway at 2 a.m. in formals,” she recalled.
Often, when they weren’t going to the dances, they would walk up to Irving Park Road to the Buffalo Ice Cream Parlor. Agnes loved ice cream sundaes, and dancing, and Bernard.
Six years after they first saw each other, in the heat of the last day of July 1937, they were married in Our Lady of Grace Church on the Northwest Side.
“It was the first air-conditioned church in the city,” Bernard said, plucking that bit of trivia out of long ago.
Family frustration
The O’Hallorans started their family with Maureen in 1939, then Peggy, Bernard Jr. (“Bernie”), Jim, the twins John and Jean, Charlie, Patrice and, in 1957, Sheila. Their home movies, often staged on the front steps of one or the other of the twin anchors of their lives, home and church, show children–always neatly dressed, shoes polished–growing like weeds and blooming suddenly from black and white into the garish colors of 1950s film.
The nine children have turned out to be what Agnes proudly calls “good, honest, hard-working kids.” The whole clan now includes 32 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren (soon to be six).
As often is the case, Bernard’s joining the rising numbers of nursing-home residents came only after a drawn-out, trying decision-making process that Bernard Jr. called “our long journey with our parents.”
Bernard’s decline had been frustrating for the whole family. After his first stroke, the general assumption was that some rehabilitation would put him right again. Instead, his mobility slowly slipped away, as did, it seemed, his interest in regaining strength. Many in the family were angry with him. If only he’d try, they would say, the whole issue of what to do about him would go away.
He had a history of not taking great care of himself. He had been a smoker and, at home after work, a drinker. He quit smoking cigars after coronary bypass surgery in 1984 and gave up drinking four years later, telling Agnes that he would be all right if she would serve dinner early.
He became focused on food, especially sweets, and put on a lot of weight. After the strokes, when physical therapists worked with him at home, he would do his exercises. When the nurses left, he wouldn’t.
Up against this seemingly immovable object came the force of Agnes O’Halloran. When she, like most of their children, became convinced that Bernard’s condition was not going to be reversed, she determined to give him the very best care, in their home but on her terms.
Throughout her years of caretaking, Agnes resisted major alterations in the house–a wheelchair lift, a ramp up to the front door– that, though they would give her mechanical advantages in dealing with Bernard, would make it more hospital-like, less a normal home.
Although home-care nurses made several visits for short stretches of time, Agnes was terribly uncomfortable with strangers in the house, unsure that the care was adequate and concerned that it cost too much.
If only she would give in a little, some of the children would say, Dad could continue to live at home.
In the end, pneumonia made the decision.
Off the lobby at St. Benedict, there is a beauty salon, an ice cream parlor (25-cent cones scooped up by volunteers) and the chapel (one of the O’Halloran family’s requirements when scouting nursing homes and the site, this past summer, of a mass celebrated by Curley on the occasion of Bernard and Agnes’ 60th anniversary). Down a hall, there is an equipped and staffed rehabilitation center and a child day-care center for the use of staff and, space permitting, the community. Day-care children and residents take art and music classes together in a wonderful win-win situation.
“The kids lose any aversion to wheelchairs or walkers,” O’Malley said. “Residents who never smile suddenly light up in the presence of children.”
Residents live in well-kept rooms off first- and second-floor corridors. Some of the rooms are miniaturized versions of the homes they left, with furniture, lamps and paintings brought in to make present lives seem more like past ones. Bernard shares a second-floor room with another man but hasn’t established any real companionship with him. “Tom sleeps too much,” Bernard complains.
Dining areas are bright and cheerful. It is a clean, progressively run place. Bernard readily asserts that he is getting very good care there, and yet . . .
“I have a 10-room house,” he said suddenly after a long silence, the thought not coming from the conversation he had been having but leaping from some inner river of yearning.
The house they bought in 1957 just before their youngest was born wasn’t the one they had driven out to Wilmette to see. But when they happened to notice it instead, they knew they would be making the big step–in ways far beyond geography–to the suburbs.
It wasn’t a large house, but before he was a truck salesman, Bernard had worked construction for his father, building houses in the Edgebrook neighborhood. He altered their new house, remodeling the kitchen; adding a porch, a bathroom and an upstairs bedroom; and making the building his in the special, intimate way that comes only with getting beneath its skin and touching its bones.
When he was done, the four-bedroom, four-bath (one of them in the basement) house had seemed comfortable enough chock-full of O’Hallorans.
One by one, the children left to lives and families of their own. Then, Bernard entered the nursing home.
“For the first time in my life,” Agnes said, still sounding amazed even though more than a year has passed, “I was alone.”
The nine children are less affected by Bernard’s admission to the home than their parents are, but they continue to be involved.
John bought a minivan so it will be easier and less expensive to take Bernard home for short visits. Bernard was able to spend Thanksgiving at the Wilmette house with Agnes, John and his family, Peggy and her family, Charlie and his. At the end of the day, he said he hated to go back. He asked if he could come out every weekend, but realistically, the frequency is more likely to be monthly. He will spend Christmas at John’s home with Agnes and the Chicago-area children.
Peggy lives closest and visits often. She agrees that the nursing home is the best solution but notes, too, that “no one goes willingly into a nursing home.”
Jim, the businessman and planner who hates crises and tries to anticipate any possible worst case, had kept a diary of his Dad’s decline. He recently has started one on his mother.
“For a long time,” said Sheila, the youngest, the one who had argued most for at-home care, “the solution settled on wasn’t OK with me, but it’s OK now. I can see that Mom has paid her dues, that he gets better care.”
Sandwich Generation
For the most part, the O’Halloran brothers and sisters are pleased that the decision about what to do about Dad has been made, that the situation is stable instead of a series of crises, that they now can devote more time and energy to their own immediate families.
They have gotten a taste of what it means to be part of the “Sandwich Generation,” people mainly in their 40s and 50s who are pressed between simultaneous responsibilities for their children and their elderly parents. Fiscal friction builds fast when nursing-home bills rub up against tuition payments. If resources are limited, do you sacrifice for the unknown–and hence possibly rosy–future of your children or for a past debt to parents–which, known, might not seem all that equitable?
In a recent magazine article on the subject, one woman complained, “My mother has been in my home longer than I was in hers.”
Even when, as is the case with the O’Hallorans, there is no need to financially support the parents–Bernard had made regular investments that turned out well–a sandwich situation means hard decisions must be made, unpleasant realities must be faced. When you’re changing the diapers of someone who once changed you, it’s hard to escape the fact that you have become something neither of you wanted, your parent’s parent.
More Americans than ever before face being sandwiched. The explosive birth rate following World War II resulted in a great bulge in the population graphs. Schools needed to be built to accommodate that bulge, fundraising bonds passed to pay for the schools, etc.
For half a century, the nation has adapted to the needs of this huge group of people. Now these Baby Boomers are turning 50, the first of them to do so as the confetti celebrating the arrival of 1996 started to hit the floor. In aging lock step with them are their 70-, 75-, 80-year-old parents, further support for the government’s conclusion that nursing homes constitute a growth industry.
Bernard’s story can be seen as a tragedy. As Sheila said, “My God, he worked his butt off his whole life to end up in a place he doesn’t want to be in surrounded by people he doesn’t know!”
Certainly Bernard’s unhappiness has elements of classic Greek tragedy in that his fate was determined long before it happened. But the O’Halloran family saga of what to do about Dad also can be seen as a triumph.
Psychologists note that a person likely has more in common with some randomly chosen person their age than they do with a sibling. The O’Halloran siblings are spread out in age over 18 years and geographically all across the country. Jim said, “I grew up with these people, and yet I don’t really know them. I can’t look inside and see what level of stress each one is able to take, what amount of effort each is willing to put out.”
Yet, when it became clear that a decision needed to be made about Bernard, each of the nine drew on individual skills or character strengths to help out. Responding to some sort of bond that lurks deep in the definition of “family,” to whatever is meant by the aphorism “blood is thicker than water,” they phoned each other, argued with each other, supported each other, worked it out. No one claims the resolution is perfect, just the best one given the circumstances. These brothers and sisters did what you would hope your kids would do if you and they faced the dilemma that the O’Hallorans did.
In an era in which it is fashionable to focus on the dysfunctions of families–witness such films as “The Myth of Fingerprints,” “The Ice Storm,” “The House of Yes,” all set at a traditional time of family gathering, Thanksgiving–this family was able to function.
If that is triumph, it is a triumph taking place all over the nation as families big and small are surprising themselves with their strength as they rise to the seemingly overwhelming challenge of elder care. Like tragedy, these triumphs likely are set in motion years in advance.
“As we were growing up,” Peggy said, “our parents gave us a lot of love and discipline and the greatest gift of all–they taught us to love each other.”
It was an unusually warm, late fall day. Bernard had asked to be taken outside and parked just to the west side of the front entrance to the home, his favorite spot for waiting for Agnes. He wore a Wilmette Country Club golf hat and a windbreaker. He called to a visitor who was walking out, someone he had met that day, calling him by name to show he remembered.
They talked about the weather for a few moments, then Bernard hit one of those blocks in his speech. His eyes lifted, looking out across the parking lot and the drive that leads up to the home, out past the traffic busying itself back and forth on Touhy Avenue. For what seemed a long time, he sat, looking.
“Nice day for golf,” he said, not with longing particularly or sorrow, just as a fact. “Nice day for golf.”
