A Grief Observed

by RICK DANLEY // June 26, 2015

IN THE YEARS before Velma Ensminger died, her husband, Dave, used to carry her from room to room. The pair shared a winding, single-story ranch house on a large farm near Moran. Dave was already in his eighties. Velma was five years his junior. The couple had been married for nearly six decades, but by then Velma no longer recognized his face.

Ensminger recalled a conversation the two had not long after Velma was diagnosed with dementia but before the worst of it had taken its toll. “I told her the day will come when you don’t know who I am,” said Ensminger. “‘Oh, no,’ she’d say. ‘I’ll remember.’ But the day did come. I’d put her to bed at night and give her a kiss and she’d look up at me and she’d say, ‘Now, who are you?’”

WEIGHED against the heaviness of his grief — which, less than a year after his wife’s death, lives so close to the surface that even the mention of her name is enough to invite tears — is the radiant lightness and warmth of Ensminger’s personality.

“You know, when I go into a room with a bunch of people,” said Ensminger, “I have this urge to shake hands with everybody there.”

At 84, the former farmer has retained his straight-backed posture and gets in and out of chairs with the limberness of a younger man. He wears his talc-white hair pulled back in a knobby ponytail and has adopted in the last two years a sparse Van Dyke beard, which he clutches when lost in thought.

Ensminger’s natural friendliness is enhanced by his wide, gap-toothed smile, whose straight line was shattered a few years ago, when a bull-calf — who preferred to keep his testicles, thank you — reared back and kicked the old man in the mouth just as Ensminger knelt behind the animal with a castration knife.

“I went to the dentist after that,” said Ensminger, “and he told me ‘I can give you a Hollywood smile for $4,000.’ I said, ‘I believe I’ll do without it.’ I’m not interested in beauty contests. In fact, the last beauty contest I was in, I came in seventh in a field of six.”

“VELMA AND I were in school together in Moran,” said Ensminger. “But I wasn’t interested in her then. I was chasing women over in Yates Center.”

But as his bachelor years ticked past, he would think of her. “She was known as ‘Miss Music’ in Moran when she was a girl. She was marvelous on the piano. She could roll them up and spread them out, you know. Like Liberace did. She could sound just like him.”

Eventually, Ensminger screwed up the courage to call and ask for a date. She was working as a legal secretary in Fort Scott then. “I was so sure she was going to say no that when she said yes, I didn’t have anything else to say.

“That’s how it started. And now it’s 58 years later, you see?”

IT WAS in the last decade that Ensminger began to notice his wife’s decline. But the signs weren’t always legible from the start. “For example, you go to the bathroom and in the medicine cabinet there’d be a sandwich with one bite out of it. And, you know, you’d take it out and give it a pitch. I was busy farming then and never really paid it much thought.

“She’d misplace things. And she saw things. There were three little men in this house that she always saw. I never could see them. ‘Yeah, don’t you see those three little men sitting right there?’ she’d say.

“‘No, I don’t see them, mother-honey.’

“She’d smell things that weren’t there. She’d think something was being cooked in the kitchen when it wasn’t. It’s a terrible disease. But you don’t argue with someone who’s got dementia. You just say, ‘Yes, dear’ and move right on. You try to keep them happy, but really there’s no happiness left. It’s hard to imagine that; she was always a happy person.”

In time, it got to the point where she was unable to care for herself. “I would stay at home and look after the little thing, every day of the week, every day of the year. You know, people would offer to come and stay, so I could get away. But I didn’t want to do that. If I went to town for two hours, I’d sit there and worry about what’s going on at home. So we just stayed here together, and it worked out just fine.”

OUT OF HABIT, Ensminger still rises at 4 a.m. “Look at this,” he says, pulling a black and gold tea packet with Japanese lettering out of a box behind the television set in the kitchen. Cho-wa! The Original Shogun Tiger Formula. “I take this in the morning when I get up. Made in Japan, but sold in California. It has three kinds of mushrooms in it. I use the distilled water over there.” A two-gallon jug of spring water with a red Ozarka label sits on the edge of the counter. “A doctor said to me one day, years ago: ‘Why do you want to drink tap water when some old man pissed in it up the line about six months ago and he was chewing tobacco and now there are 400 carcinogens in the water that they can’t get out. Why do you want to drink that?’ he says. ‘You can afford Ozarka.’

“So I use that for the tea. Now, if you would take hot water and dump in two or three little pieces of cardboard and boil it up, and then take the cardboard out and drink that, it would taste about the same as this stuff.”

Does it at least help?

“Who knows. I’ve been doing it every morning for so long. For years I got up at 4 o’clock, because I had to take Vel to the bathroom. I’d clean her up, then I‘d put her back into bed. And then I’d rush out the door, get in the truck, then run to Iola and get the groceries we needed for the day, and be back before she’d ever know I was gone. You know, at 4 a.m. in Walmart there’s nobody much in there.”

Once it became too hard for Velma to swallow, feeding her became Ensminger’s chief job. “But it had to all be soft, and very small bites. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Ice cream. Just anything I had that would be soft and that she would like. Fruit I would smash up and feed to her. She was a swell little gal. Never complained.”

VELMA died in November. “She was in the back of the house and fell or did something to her leg, so I took her over to Windsor Place nursing home, in Iola, and she was there for two months and the therapy girls there got her walking again, so I brought her back home, and I thought we were getting along real good and I put her to bed one Wednesday night and she couldn’t get up the next morning.” Ensminger begins to weep. “I always helped her up but I asked her that morning if it would be all right if I called 911 and she said it would be OK, and so they came and took her to the hospital and she passed away eight days later.”

It was a good life, Ensminger said, a happy life. “She was a hard worker. She looked after everything and everyone. She loved our kids. Of course when Velmzie was younger she would be here with the kids. We had four of those little rascals running around here, you know. We used to have a white vinyl floor in here, and we had three tricycles, and they used to chase each other around the fireplace and there would be black marks where they were skidding around the corners. And Velmzie, of course, would get down there and clean it up all the time. Eventually we got smart and put carpet in. But that was after the tricycle stage. She was a very good mother. Very happy with those four little ones.”

THERE ARE no rules for living alone when you’ve shared a home for as long as the Ensmingers did. He didn’t leave the farm during the two months following her death. He didn’t want to see anybody. His family would bring food and keep him company. He is especially grateful to two relatives, widows both, who were able to counsel him when the grief was loudest in his ears and all his thoughts were wound in briar, and to the Rev. Steve Traw, at Carlyle Presbyterian Church — a widower himself — whom Ensminger calls the “finest pastor I’ve ever run into.”

THESE DAYS you’ll often find Ensminger down at his “office” — a clutch of tables in the back of Iola’s McDonald’s, where he gathers with other seniors for coffee during the week. “That does me more good than anything. It’s a happy place. And those people in Iola are just the friendliest, nicest people you’d ever want to meet, and I love them all.

“You know, I’m not the only one who’s ever lost a mate. If you looked around, you’d see a lot of people in a lot worse shape than you are. … I’m going to be 85 in November. If had a mission statement, I guess it would be this: I want to be as nice to people as I can as long as I’m alive.”

THE PATH out to Ensminger’s pond travels by a barn his uncle erected in 1903. It’s dark inside except for where the sunlight glances in through the vertical slats. A complicated pattern of beams climbs up into the vaulted ceiling. “There are no nails in it,” said Ensminger. “It’s all done with pegs.”

Behind the barn are empty cattle pens. And behind that a pond, with an island in the middle from which geese arrive and depart by the hundreds, and, on the opposite bank, a small hill. “That’s where I’m going to spread Velma’s ashes.” At the moment, they rest in a box on a padded recliner in his den. “And I’m going to have mine put there, too.”

After the sudden death of his own wife, the novelist Julian Barnes wrote: “There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.”

Ensminger agrees. He treats with gratitude the years he had with Velma, and cherishes the artifacts of their life together that still crowd the couple’s rural home.

“But, you know, I still can’t find her purse. It’s somewhere in the house — I don’t know where. She always carried it, and I’ve looked everywhere. It’s in here. I know it is. And, you know, someday I’ll find it.”

“WHEN she was over at Windsor for those two months, one day the therapy girls pushed her up to a piano and asked her to play them something. And for two minutes the Lord let her play the piano, and she played them the most beautiful song they ever heard. I asked them, ‘What song?’ Well, one thought it was ‘To a Wild Rose.’ The other said ‘No, it was the ‘Nocturnes.’ I don’t know what it was, because I wasn’t there. It was a beautiful song. For two minutes she had it. When she got through and they pulled her away from the piano, she didn’t even know that that was a piano or that she’d ever played. You see how that works? You get just a little time.”

Originally published on June 26, 2015.