Bill Tilson sits beside his wife Blanche, who’s in her wheelchair in the dining room at Avamere Twin Oaks of Sweet Home.
He smiles at her and gently strokes her hand. Blanche gazes at his face but doesn’t say anything. She can’t, though she occasionally tries.
She’s in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease and when a visitor was present recently, for over an hour, she said nothing €“merely gazing at her husband’s face from time to time.
Bill says she recognizes him, that’s about all that’s left of their relationship from her side.
But not Bill’s.
He picks up a spoon and begins to feed her some pudding for dessert after her lunch, which he’s also fed her.
Later, he’ll be back to feed her dinner.
“Bill is the most loving man I’ve ever seen in a nursing home setting,” said nurse Jean Boatright, who’s worked at Twin Oaks for years. “He’s religious about taking care of her.”
Lori O’Brien, who has worked in the kitchen at Twin Oaks for three years, said Bill reminds her of the movie “The Notebook,” about a man who visits his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife every day and reads her the story of their life together.
“I work in a business where we see so many people who have no one,” O’Brien said. “In the beginning (family members) come and they see people, but after a while they just lose that. They have their own lives and they just fade away. It doesn’t mean they don’t love them, but it’s hard.
“Bill is so strong. He’s devoted to her. It’s just an amazing thing.”
Today, Bill has arrived around noon to feed Blanche her lunch. After the meal, nurse’s aides wheel Blanche to her room, where they lift her into bed for her afternoon nap. The aides say she sleeps about 18 hours a day, but when she’s awake Bill’s usually there.
Bill, 78, has lived in Sweet Home off and on throughout his life, most recently after he retired in 1995 from Seattle City Light, where he worked for 14 years after getting laid off at Willamette Industries after the Sweet Home sawmill shut down, where he’d worked 14 years before that.
Born in North Carolina, Bill graduated from high school in Ione, Calif., north of Stockton, and joined the Navy during the Korean War, serving eight years until his discharge in 1958.
He came to Sweet Home in 1963, working for Amos Horner’s mill in Cascadia, then working for Willamette. He said he did “everything from picking up sticks to pulling green chain, runing the resaw, driving carrier and running the pond boat.”
Both he and Blanche had had prior marriages before they met at the Waterhole tavern in Foster, where she worked.
“I met her and thought, yeah, OK,” Bill said. He asked her out a few times but when he suggested that their relationship could get more serious, Blanche backpedaled.
“She wasn’t ready, so I said I’d stay away for a year,” he said. “I’d see her downtown now and then, but that was it. After a year I went back and she said, ‘You son of a gun. You meant it.'”
They were married in Reno.
“We’ve been together 37 years,” Bill said, cradling Blanche’s hand in his. “We’ve really had an enjoyable life.”
He said they hunted and fished together and did a lot of fishing in the Puget Sound when they lived in Seattle.
“She loved to hunt and fish,” Bill said. “She could outfish me.”
Blanche, who turned 76 on June 17, began to show signs of Alzheimer’s several years ago and was moved to Twin Oaks three years ago. Prior to the onset of the disease, he said she was “happy-go-lucky. Everybody loved her.”
Bill said she displayed some of the aggressive behavior that is common with Alzheimer’s patients when she first arrived, but that ended quickly.
“She was a problem when she first came here,” he said. “Since she’s advanced, she’s become an ideal resident. Everybody likes her.”
He said he believes Blanche knows him, though she can’t speak.
“If I’m not here she misses me and I get heck for it,” he said.
“That’s all I do, take care of her.”
He noted that she’s spent three birthdays at the care center. He organized a party for her last week to celebrate with staff and other residents.
O’Brien said he does things like that for his wife frequently.
“We all wanted to cry on Valentine’s Day,” she said. “He brought her the sweetest card and kissed her on the forehead.
“It makes us want to cry half the time. I just hope my husband would be like that if I get that way.”
The space around Blanche’s bed is festooned with cheerful cards, valentines, flowers and stuffed animals.
“When they lay her down, I sit with her in her room while she goes to sleep. Sometimes she doesn’t go to sleep right away.”
He said he’s only missed a few days, “when I’ve been sick,” since Blanche moved to the facility.
“Bill is here every day unless he has a doctor’s appointment,” Boatright said. “Then he calls to make sure she is getting help.
Bill is religious about taking care of her. We feel his love too. Even when he’s not here he’s watching over her.”
She said Bill is “great pals” with the entire staff and calls them all by name, “which makes us feel good.”
O’Brien echoed that.
“It’s inspiring to all of us,” she said. “He impresses us in the rest of this building every day and he’s kind to the rest of us too. He hangs out and helps us bus tables at night. He’s an appreciative individual and that shows in everything he does.”
Bill used to visit Twin Oaks three times a day “but I had to back off. It was too much,” he said.
When he’s not at Twin Oaks, he said, he enjoys playing games and checking up on the news on his computer. He said he’s still interested in hunting and fishing and goes fishing “once in a while” with a friend who has a drift boat.
Bill said he normally spends about seven hours a day at Twin Oaks.
A Twin Oaks cook told Boatright how Bill had told her, “I love (Blanche) just as much now as the day I met her,” Boatright said.
O’Brien said Bill’s example has taught her and others not to be quite so cynical in a world where, she said, commitment seems to be in short supply.
“He knows she’s not going to get better. He knows she’s not going to come home,” O’Brien said. “People don’t have that kind of love for each other any more. He gives the rest of us faith, especially single people, that these things still exist.”
Bill smiles at Blanche as he sits beside her bed. She’s silently gazing at the ceiling, going to sleep.
“Most of our life together has been a beautiful life,” he said.