Cheryl Walsh

A review of the novel Evensong, by Stewart O'Nan.

It's difficult, and dangerous, to grow old alone.

Stewart O'Nan knows this, as do the ladies of Pittsburgh's Humpty Dumpty Club in his novel Evensong. Their group's mission is to help their fellow aging seniors to negotiate life as they face the everyday challenges of increasing frailty, decreasing mobility, failing strength, and/or declining cognition, within an ever smaller circle of acquaintance.

The five HDs (as they call themselves) provide rides, pick up prescriptions, do welfare checks, help folks downsize and move, and arrange all manner of services when others need help of whatever kind to remain as independent as they can. Each woman has her own challenges, her own living situation, and a distinct personality, but they are bound together by their mission and need to be useful, as well as their long-time membership in their Episcopal church.

It's an episodic book with mostly short chapters that explore the lives and concerns of each woman. The overarching narrative, which is more of a frame for the novel than a real driving force, begins when their leader and master administrator, Joan, has a nasty fall that incapacitates her, and the other four need to soldier on without her, not knowing when or if she will be able to take the reins again. This has the greatest consequence for Kitzi, whom Joan has tapped for the leadership role, and she struggles to find a balance between leadership and delegation. The others struggle with more personal issues—Arlene with signs of her own cognitive impairment, Emily with trusting her alcoholic daughter, and Susie with low self-esteem and dating after her divorce.

Personally, I've always been attracted to older characters, probably because their experience is long and more complicated by memory. O'Nan gives us four marvelous character studies in Evensong. I was impressed with his ability to bring the HD women to life by exploring the reality of aging with clear-eyed curiosity and empathy. These women are to be admired and not pitied, even when bad things happen or they feel they are failures.

Readers who know Pittsburgh well have many pleasures in store—the sense of place and time is delightful. Readers who look for a plot with lots of forward momentum are likely to get frustrated with the slow progress of the narrative through-line. What kept me reading was my affection for the characters, the realism of their individual challenges and dilemmas, and their dedication to one another and to creating a community through service.

With thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Monthly Press for providing access to an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

A review of Winning the Earthquake: How Jeannette Rankin Defied All Odds to Become the First Woman in Congress, by Lorissa Rinehart

I have always been curious about Jeannette Rankin, who was elected to Congress before women had even won the right to vote nationwide. She was also the sole dissenting vote for declaring war on Japan in December 1941, which was even more courageous than her vote against entering the Great War in 1917, when there were others who also voted against. Besides these scant facts, I didn't know much about her. Lorissa Rinehart's astute biography provides a surprising perspective on 20th-century history while relating the story of a remarkable woman.

In my mind, Rankin has always been associated with isolationism. But Rinehart's biography gives much more texture and complexity to her story, showing me how very wrong I was. She was categorically not an isolationist; she believed fervently in international engagement to avoid war. Her antiwar stance had less to do with pacifism than Progressivism. She saw war as a capitalist project to profit the munitions and affiliated industries at the expense of taxpayers and workers. To put it simplistically, she wanted to strangle war by cutting off the supply of armaments--which American industry had been selling to both sides. Given the pointless carnage of the Great War, it is hard to refute her insight. Rankin also saw the folly of the Treaty of Versailles, which she said laid the foundation for war rather than peace. While she was not alone in this opinion, the unpopularity of her vote against entering the war practically eliminated the audience for her warning.

The book provides a good survey of Progressivism and the woman suffrage movement through the lens of Rankin's participation. Both movements ostracized her after her stand against entering the war, especially the suffragists. They were still working for the passage of universal woman suffrage, and to have the only woman in Congress make an extremely unpopular vote was, in their view, a betrayal of the cause. The intersectional political conflicts that played out in Rankin's life story were fascinating, and Rinehart does an excellent job of parsing them out and making them understandable. The title is a little misleading, particularly the subtitle, because the book covers Rankin's entire life and does not focus only on her first election to Congress--the most interesting and valuable parts of the story take place after 1916.

The book doesn't dwell on Rankin's personal life, though the basic facts are provided, including many events during her early life in Montana. Readers who like their history re-enacted scene by scene may find this book less engaging than they would like, but the narrative moves along at a brisk pace, the analysis is concise and clear, and the content fascinating. It is more journalistic than interpretive, reportage rather than creative nonfiction, but the prose is warmer, livelier, and more eloquent than typical reportage. It is a pleasure to read, a biography worthy of a remarkable life.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for providing access to an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

A review of Keep This for Me by Jennifer Fawcett.

Anyone who reads my book reviews will sooner rather than later come across the phrase great sense of place. It's not the only reason I read fiction, but if a novel transports me to a particular place and lets me live there awhile, it usually gets my recommendation. Jennifer Fawcett's new thriller, Keep This for Me, does this admirably, while providing intriguing characters, a suspenseful plot, and enough scary moments to please readers who like a bit of a fright.

The setting is a beach town on Lake Ontario—in summer a bustling tourist town overrun with lakeside cottage residents, in winter an insular small town full of working-class folks trying to get by. Growing up in Michigan, I spent most of my family's vacations at one or another of these Great Lakes beach towns, and I've visited a couple in winter, too, courtesy of friends whose families owned lakeside houses. Keep This for Me beautifully captures the essence of the Great Lakes beach town and, what's more, the moods of the lake—whether benevolent or malevolent—that define its character.

The protagonist, Fiona, returns to the beach town where her mother, Ana, disappeared when she was a toddler, and where she spent summers at her family's cottage when she was growing up. It's now the off-season, winter is approaching, and Fiona hopes to gain some understanding of how her mother's disappearance affected and continues to affect her. Fiona has enough internal conflict to complicate her motives as each of her decisions moves her more deeply into the case of the serial killer linked to the disappearance of her mother.

Fiona and Ana, each in her own timeline, are insecure about their role as a mother and frightened by their perceived inadequacy to care for a young child whom they desperately love. While this insecurity verges on the irritating, it is balanced on the one hand by other characters who are supportive and don't allow them to flail about too long, and on the other by characters who have great confidence in what they are doing, whether for or against the novel's moral grain.

What I find most fascinating about Keep This for Me is its examination and exploration of the inheritance of moral character. Is it possible to overcome the flaws of your parents or family, or are you destined to live out the narrative your parents started? Both Fiona and the family of Eddie Ward, the serial killer, wrestle with this question. As the story unfolds, the question becomes how much one's belief in destiny becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The suspense is deftly created and leads to a climactic night scene at the lake with a worthy payoff. My one bone to pick is that in order to get Fiona to this scene, an otherwise reasonably intelligent woman becomes rather foolish. At this point the hitherto character-driven story becomes suddenly plot-driven. Common though this move is in thrillers (you could almost consider it a convention of the genre), I always find it disappointing. Would someone who is always second-guessing herself, and always sensing danger to boot, really be so impulsive about going into what she knows is an extremely dangerous situation on the lake she knows so well? Fawcett then compounds the problem by having Fiona in essence step out of the ongoing scene to explain why she's doing something so stupid. Staying in the moment and following the impulse or compulsion would be more convincing, even if (especially if?) the compulsion isn't all that believable in the first place.

I do wish this book were longer. (I tend to be a fan of books the size of bricks.) Fawcett's prose is wonderful and her depiction of psychological states is great, which makes the implausible psychology late in the book all the more noticeable. Experiencing more of the back stories might have made what I see as contradictions in character more understandable. And there's more creepiness and suspense to be milked from several of the characters' stories. 

I'm looking forward to reading Jennifer Fawcett's next book and seeing what the play of her wondrous imagination brings us.

Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for providing access to an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Back when film photography was mainstream, many photographers—maybe even most—didn't really like the darkroom. As soon as digital photography advanced far enough to give photographers the quality they wanted in their images, the vast majority forsook the no longer necessary evils of wet chemicals and fumes and safelights and embraced the newer and faster-paced frustrations of software, screen, and inkjet printer.

But Bru loved the darkroom and never wanted to join the revolution. He felt a strong affection for the enclosed space and amber light and an attachment to the equipment and supplies and processes that warrant the word love. It was where he exercised his craft, where he took the time to get to know the images he had captured, to learn their language, to hear their stories, to see the invisible. The darkroom was not just a place, it was a practice. A spiritual practice.

The darkroom is an intimate space. When a photographer shares it with you, and lets you see how they decide on the level of exposure, contrast, framing, where to burn in and where to dodge, there's a trust that forms a deep bond. When Bru let me see his images appear in the developer before he saw them himself, I knew I was special.

He had to press me to take up photography. I didn't feel I had the time to devote to it—I was working 30 hours a week and had more than enough creative projects to fill my off-hours. Taking up a new craft that entailed lots of technical knowledge didn't seem practical. But he wanted to share his passion with me, so he bought me a Pentax K1000 and wrote on the accompanying card: "Welcome to the darkroom."

I realized later that Bru needed to teach me photography because he needed to confer with someone about printing. He loved to bounce ideas off me. I was the substitute for the photographic community he'd left in Sydney, where he was well-known and in some corners well-loved. He told me I was one of the best students he'd ever had. I think he had to believe this more than it had to be true.

He relied on me more and more as his cognitive abilities declined. I helped him keep track of all the variables that go into making a print. Eventually, I had to become the craftsman he once was and guide his decisions to get the print to be the way he saw it in his mind and wanted to see it with his eyes. I really did help him make some great prints. And then I helped him make some good prints among a bunch of indifferent ones. And then, when he could no longer keep the variables straight and the steps in sequence for even a few minutes, I tried to help and pretty much failed.

I thought that the day he decided he was through with the darkroom would be terribly traumatic for him. But it was anti-climactic.

Looking like he was afraid he was letting me down, he said, "I'm not going into the darkroom anymore."

"I think that's a good decision. You haven't been enjoying it very much."

"No. I haven't been."

I smiled, and he smiled back, so relieved.

Then I went upstairs and burst into tears.

The darkroom is almost just as he left it. I put away the negatives he had been working with and pressed his last prints flat, but work prints are still scattered over the dry bench, his weights and mats still sit next to the enlarger. The drying screen is still suspended over the wet bench. Neither of us has rolled it back up and hung it out of the way in its designated spot on the wall. Bru has said a few times that we should clear everything out, but I tell him no, I really want to use it when I retire and have more time.

It's true. I want to get back into the darkroom when I have more time. I'm not sure when that will happen, though, if ever.

The last image he printed was one of me. I don't know if it's the London Underground or the Paris Métro, but we are on a subway train, and I'm in the foreground, up close and out of focus—intentionally—with passengers packed into all the seats behind me. There are all sorts of people, of different classes and races, one sleeping, others looking tired, one smiling. It doesn't have quite enough contrast, one area really needs some burning in, and there are small points that need retouching that Bru will never do.

It's still a great image. It deserves a better print. I don't know that it will ever get one.

A review of The Californians by Brian Castleberry.

The Californians is a multigenerational saga that chronicles the rise and decline of a family of 20th-century creatives. Spanning a century and four generations, the story technically follows two families, but they are spliced together in the second generation by irresponsibility and betrayal. Those two themes shape the characters and drive the plot, along with the creative passion of protagonists Klaus and Diane, and a strong if unearned sense of entitlement on the part of several other characters.

The structure of the novel is more complex than the typical family saga, and so requires a bit more effort on the reader's part to follow it. Tobey, the fourth generation of this hybrid family, opens and closes the book in 2024. The other two point-of-view characters are Klaus, a silent film director in the 1920s and a television producer/director in the 1950s and '60s, and his granddaughter Diane, a photorealist painter in the 1980s and a conceptual/performance artist in the 2000s. Each POV character's story unfolds basically chronologically, but they are braided together so that the story jumps back and forth between and among time periods, with "interstitial" material between chapters in the form of a website, news clippings, letters, emails, text messages, ads, articles, a student essay, a blog post, book excerpts, reviews, and interviews. This material jumps all over the place chronologically, but with clear time markers.

As a big fan of braided narratives, I enjoyed the juxtapositions that resulted from this structure, though in the first third of the book, I did wish for a kind of genealogical chart to keep track of how the characters were related. Klaus's son and Diane's father, Percy, had a brief affair with Mrs. Harlan, who had been married to the star of Klaus's best-known TV show. Percy left adolescent Diane with Mrs. Harlan and her son, Track (who became Tobey's father). Diane and Track developed a close bond and looked upon themselves as "almost" siblings (though they drifted apart as adults), and Mrs. Harlan became Diane's only reliable parental figure.

The most tragic aspect of this story results from absent or inadequate parenting in each generation—Klaus was an orphan, and in each generation lapses in parenting produce painful and sometimes disastrous results. All the characters are deeply flawed, and many readers may find them unlikable, but I also sympathized with each of the protagonists. Klaus is terribly self-centered, and single-minded in his creative life—which by its very nature is collaborative—to the detriment of many around him. But he can be very generous and is helplessly in love with his wife. Diane spends much of her life in avoidance and denial, but she is also kind-hearted and capable of real focus when she finds her direction. Tobey has terrible judgment and is prone to escapism, but he yearns to be a good person and is trying to find a purchase for his moral compass.

The tragedy of the story is bolstered by the terrible effects of the AIDS pandemic, climate change, and tech-enabled corruption. However, it is also balanced by the artistic accomplishments and creative fire of both Klaus and Diane. What I really liked about this tale of creative people wrestling with their demons is that the greatness of their art is not dependent on the demons. Rather, they achieved a measure of greatness in spite of the demons. What might they have achieved in nurturing rather than undermining circumstances? Inside that tragedy is also a scrap of hope.

With thanks to NetGalley and Mariner Books for providing access to an advance copy.

A review of the novel A House for Miss Pauline, by Diana McCaulay.

I loved Diana McCaulay's wonderful protagonist, Miss Pauline Sinclair, a 99-year-old woman who has lived her whole life in the Jamaican country village of Mason Hall. In the weeks before her 100th birthday, the stones of her house begin to move at night and speak to her, not only disturbing her sleep but roiling her conscience. She has lived her whole life by her own rules, not an easy thing for a Black woman in the 20th century and a Jamaican elder in the 21st century. And her conscience is clear with respect to the laws she has broken and the taboos she has violated. But there are also compromises she has made that go against the grain of her moral fiber, and the stones are demanding a reckoning. She dreads that reckoning, and she avoids and courts it by turns. She knows that she will never be at peace until she atones for the harm she has caused others, but she is pragmatic enough to know that the atonement may destroy her and everything she has built in her life.

Legacy is a bright thread woven into the fabric of McCaulay's story. Not only Miss Pauline's legacy, but the legacy of slavery in Jamaica and worldwide—and not only the physical legacy embodied in land, property, and wealth, but the spiritual legacy that inhabits the souls of all descendants of slavery—descendants of the enslavers and well as of the enslaved. The competing claims of ancestry grow in breadth and depth for Miss Pauline, and the clear-eyed wisdom and regret she brings to her life's reckoning offer a fragile hope for healing.

Thank you to NetGalley and Algonquin Books for providing access to an advance copy.

A review of To Save the Man by John Sayles.

This deeply researched novel juxtaposes life at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in the late 19th century with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In this juxtaposition lies the book's great work of imagination, allowing the reader to experience what Wounded Knee meant to some of the students at the school as well as to the reformers who ran the school. At the same time, it illuminates the motivations and effects of the school's program of forced assimilation, the unabashed goal of which was "to save the man" by killing the Indian within him.

I greatly appreciated the depth and breadth of Sayles's research. For the first time, I began to understand the good intentions that so successfully masked the cruelty and arrogance of the various reformers who founded and promoted the Indian boarding schools of the 19th and 20th century. I also appreciated Sayles's respect for Native cultures and his refusal to make his Native characters archetypes or stock characters. As a reader, I understood them as individuals with different levels of Native experience and White exposure and education, and never did I feel compelled to see them as composites or representatives of their tribes.

Because there are so many characters in this novel from so many backgrounds—a feature of the Carlisle School in that it had students from all across the continent—the narrative momentum was diluted. Many interesting things happened, but not everything was of interest to me, and without the less-than-interesting events forming a forward-moving narrative thrust, the pacing seemed to lag. The description of life at the school often felt ethnographic—recording the culture of the Carlisle School in its enforced uniformity that overlaid the great diversity of its students. I appreciate that in many ways, but I also got impatient with it when I wanted the story to move forward.

Sayles wanted to make this story into a movie, and I wanted to read the book in part because I admire his movies so much—he is one of my favorite film directors. I could see much of the ethnographic nature of the book made into the kind of slice-of-life scenes that Sayles does so very well. He uses cinematic techniques in much of the book, most noticeably quick cuts between scenes and characters that sometimes even interrupt dialogue—something that is highly effective in movies but a bit jarring in a book, at least until you get used to it. It did help to propel the book forward through a great deal of character development without complicating the plot further, which ultimately enhanced my reading of the book.

I also wanted to read To Save the Man because I'm very interested in the history of Native America, wherein the boarding schools and the Wounded Knee massacre both loom large. Despite my impatience with the novel's slow narrative development, I enjoyed reading it and greatly appreciate the insight I gained into the origins of the Indian boarding schools and the additional perspective on Wounded Knee. I was trained as a historian before I became a fiction writer, and I'm always aware that even the most deeply researched novels are not works of history. However, good historical fiction can give you the feeling of being in a distant time and place in ways that are otherwise inaccessible. John Sayles does that very well in To Save the Man, which gave me greater empathy for and understanding of the people who were caught up in that history.

Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House for providing access to an advance copy.

Annual celebrations are difficult for me these days. It's too easy to compare how Bru is now with how he was last year on our wedding anniversary, on my birthday, on his birthday, on Thanksgiving, on Christmas. In other words, events we celebrate every year mark his decline with a peculiar clarity.

One of the mercies of dementia is that you usually can't remember clearly what it was like to be able to do something you can no longer do. It's hard to connect the past with the present in that way. You might have some notion of your former capabilities, but you can't remember exactly how you did something and compare it with your current incapacity to do the same thing. The good feeling of accomplishing something can survive without being canceled by the disappointment or grief that you can no longer do what made you feel so good.

Usually that's how it works, anyway. This past Christmastime, while I could clearly measure differences in Bru's ability to take part in the traditional activities of the season—baking, decorating, shopping for gifts and wrapping them—Bru was happily ignorant of what we'd done in the past. Everything was a surprise.

There was one thing he was anticipating, however—hosting friends for Christmas dinner.

That the dinner was a holiday celebration made no difference to him. He was just over the moon that we were having someone over for dinner. It had been over a year since this had happened, dinner parties being beyond my bandwidth these days. When I told him our friends were coming for dinner, he said, "Really? We're going to sit at the table and eat and talk and laugh? Oh, that's wonderful!"

It surprised me how clear his expectations were, and I was happy that he was excited about something. (I also felt guilty that I hadn't made more of an effort to have people over.)

And at Christmas, we did sit at the table with two dear friends and we did eat and talk and laugh. At least, three of us did. Bru was very quiet, and I was so wrapped up in the demands of hospitality that I didn't notice right away. He got up at one point and brought a photographic book to the table. We all looked at it and were very appreciative of it, but Bru didn't say much about it. I gave some background information about the book and told the story of when Bru bought it. One of our guests was very taken with it and will probably buy a copy for herself. Bru ate quietly for a while, and then he wandered off again.

I followed him a few minutes later and asked if he was OK. He said no. "I wanted to talk about that book."

I said I was sorry and invited him to come back. "We're all interested in what you want to say. I'll be sure to give you time to talk all you want."

"No," he said with a slow shake of his head. "I don't think I can."

He wasn't frustrated like he gets when he can't find the words to say what he means. He was mostly bemused and, underneath that, deeply disappointed.

He didn't know what he wanted to say. He knew there was something, once upon a time, that was important to him about that book. But he couldn't think of it now.

It broke my heart, not only that his joyful anticipation was disappointed, but that he was aware of the disappointment.

He has always been accepting of his limitations, and he accepted this with admirable grace. We came back to the table with another book, one that was handy because he had just found it under the Christmas tree that morning. It was one I knew our friends would appreciate as well. He also brought a funny greeting card that he had been giggling about all day.

With the help of the good company of our friends, I moved through the rest of dinner and dessert with good humor and gratitude. Bru did not exactly enjoy himself, but I think he felt some satisfaction in the good conversation and the laughter of others.

I didn't cry until later, until the dishes were washed and Bru had gone to sleep. I'm grateful Bru was spared my grief.

Musings on Ten Thousand Joys and Ten Thousand Sorrows: A Couple's Journey Through Alzheimer's, by Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle.

Finding meaning in the loss of the capacity to find meaning: that is the challenge for anyone whose life has been spent in the pursuit of meaning and who now faces dementia. Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle and her husband, Harrison "Hob" Hoblitzelle, both put the study and practice of meditation at the center of their personal and professional lives. Olivia's memoir of their life after Hob had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's refers to many of the difficulties they encountered, but she spends much more time describing and explaining the rewards of sharing, insight, and patience.

Hob and Olivia decided soon after his diagnosis to accept his condition and be open to the lessons it offered, and he spent much of his final years observing with curiosity the progress of the disease. It was meaningful to him, and he could share that with Olivia, and that sharing multiplied the joys of their journey together.

As I read it, I was a bit envious.

I have often wondered whether being more open with Bru about his dementia might be good for him, and for me. But his reaction to being told he had dementia was very different from Hob's. The diagnosis was deeply traumatic. For months, he refused to leave the house without me. He did not want to be alone at home, either. He was terribly anxious and grief-stricken for weeks and weeks. Only gradually did we claw our way back to a place where he could exercise a significant level of independence.

He has since lost most of that independence, but the intense anxiety has faded away. Thank God.

Though I was distressed by Bru's diagnosis—I knew he had some cognitive problems, but I hadn't realized he had already crossed over the line that defines dementia—I was traumatized by his anxiety. Now I rarely mention his dementia to him or in his presence. Really, only at the doctor's office. If we talk about his condition, we refer to his "memory problems." He knows he has lost many of his memories—he can't remember how we met, or some of the places where he taught, or colleagues he worked with every day. He knows he has trouble solving problems and can't find the words for what he wants to say. He knows his capacities are diminished, but he thinks of it as normal aging. Which it isn't, however common it might be among people in their late 80s.

Would it be better for him to find meaning in his diminishment? Would greater awareness in the moment be a blessing or a curse, a joy or a sorrow? Would it be both, and could I stand the curse for the sake of the blessing?

Though Bru didn't have as strong a commitment or understanding of meditation and spiritual journeying as the Hoblitzelles, he has long been a consciously spiritual person and did keep up a meditation practice for many years until very recently. However, he no longer understands the point of meditation.

He has found other, narrower, outlets. He still finds comfort in sharing contemplative spaces with me, for example, and he loves to study black and white photographs that he has made, as well as those of some of the great photographers he has known. He is often moved to the point of tears when he is fully immersed in an image or a moment. There is a deep joy in that, but the concepts behind such experiences are beyond his interest.

Bru's narrower outlets get narrower all the time. The narrowing seems to be the corresponding sorrow to my continuing joy in the beauty of our everyday. It is a mercy that Bru isn't aware of the narrowing as such. And I'm grateful for such mercies, though I still weep over them.

For all the time I've known Bru, he hasn't been religious. (He joined the Mormons as a teenager but left them after a few years.) I've been a Roman Catholic all my life, and for most of our marriage, he was quite happy to be left behind when I went to Mass. However, as his cognitive decline became more noticeable, his desire to come along grew.

I believe this began because he simply didn't want to be alone, but he often seems to enjoy Mass now. Always a people watcher, he observes how our fellow parishioners pray (or don't), how children behave (or don't), and how people dress up (or don't). He likes the music when it's well done, which is most of the time, and he really likes how one of the priests preaches.

Two Sundays ago, he seemed confused and a little upset before we left for church. This isn't unusual when we are leaving the house, but he seemed to have something on his mind that he couldn't articulate. He said he didn't feel well. This also isn't unusual, but I told him we could stay home, that if he felt sick we didn't need to go to church.

"No, I want to go to church. I've been looking forward to it."

As we walked to the church, he was close to tears and said several times, "I'm sorry," as if he had done something that had hurt me. I tried to reassure him that all was well, and the wave of emotion receded, though it swelled again when we sat down, and then receded once more.

The priest announced at the beginning of Mass that there would be an anointing of the sick after the homily. I wondered whether I should be anointed, to help ease the psychological strain I've been feeling, and I also thought how wonderful it would be if Bru were anointed. But I immediately dismissed both ideas because I didn't want to create any additional confusion for Bru. He's not familiar with the rite, and I didn't know if he would understand my instructions in the moment. So when the time came, we didn't stand for the blessing.

But as the actual anointing began, I could tell Bru was agitated and close to tears. I put my hand on his knee and leaned close to ask him if he was OK. He shook his head. Then something prompted me to ask if he wanted to be anointed. He took a beat to answer, but when he did, it was a very firm "Yes."

I whispered, "OK! Stand up, now."

I guided him to the end of the pew. Then I showed him how to hold his hands, palms upward. When the priest anointed his forehead, I said "Amen" for him, and when his palms were anointed, he said "Amen" for himself.

He became calm as we sat down, and I wondered briefly if a miracle would take place, if his dementia would disappear or his cognitive decline would recede like the wave of emotion after his anointing.

It didn't. There was no miracle cure. But something seemed different.

When we got home, he sobbed for a long time, regretting the difficulties his family endured when he was young. Afterwards, he seemed lighter, and he was more talkative and engaged than usual for the rest of the day.

We didn't talk about the anointing.

The next morning, he was positively chirpy. He was watching the squirrels in the backyard, and hoping some deer would come by so he could go out and shoo them away. He laughed at jokes and made very bad puns. And he was singing, a phrase here and there from old standards, usually triggered by a word or phrase from our conversation.

There's no miracle here. He doesn't remember his anointing at all. But since then, he has been lighter and happier. Not a lot, but enough to notice. I hope (and pray, with gratitude) that this new ease, whatever the source, will continue to give him more good days in whatever time he has left.