Visiting & Companionship
There is a kind of poverty no agency serves, and its whole cure is a man who comes back.
Wednesday night, the county home, the room at the end of the east wing. The old man is ninety-one and ran a dairy for fifty years, and for the first three visits he called the visitor Danny, who is a nephew in Oregon who has not been here since the funeral. The visitor let it go. He brought the sports page and read the box scores aloud and the old man corrected his pronunciation of a pitcher's name.
Tonight the old man looks at him when he comes in and says, "You're not Danny." The visitor says no, he is not. The old man thinks about it. "You're the one who comes on Wednesdays," he says, and goes back to the box scores.
The visitor drives home with that sentence in the truck. He had been a stand-in for a nephew. Now he is a thing in his own right, with a day attached, known by the one fact about him that matters in that room, which is that he comes back. He has been called a great many things in his life. He is not sure any of them were truer than that one.
The loneliest people in a town are not hungry. They are fed, housed, and medicated, and nobody has said their name on purpose in a week. The widow whose phone stopped ringing years ago. The man whose children are three states away and busy. The prisoner whose name nobody on the outside says anymore. For these people the scarce thing is not money and not a service. It is a human being who comes, and then comes again, and this is the room on the hall that requires the least skill and strikes the wound most directly, because the wound is the loneliness and the visit is the only thing that touches it.
Visiting & Companionship
"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body" — Hebrews 13:3
As though in prison with them. Not remember them in prayer, though that is good. Remember them as if the bars were on both sides of the conversation, as if the man visiting had been issued the same bed and the same hour of yard. The writer gives the reason at the end and it is physical: since you also are in the body. A man who still has a body knows what a body in a locked room or a narrow bed is missing, and the knowledge is the instruction. The old man in the east wing is not in prison. He is in a room he cannot leave, with a window and a television, and the man who came on Wednesday remembered him as though he were in that room himself, because one day he will be.
Nothing to Bring
Men stall at the door of this room because they imagine they have to bring something. They are the something.
Sit and listen: the old are carrying seventy years of stories with no remaining audience, and being the audience is the service. Read aloud: the box scores, a novel, the Psalms. Eyes fail before minds do. Sing: a handful of men singing old hymns in a common room on a Sunday afternoon reaches residents that conversation no longer reaches, and the staff will say so. Play cards, dominoes, checkers; the game is a container for the company, the way the mower and the workbook were. None of it requires a skill. All of it requires a man who is willing to be in a room where nothing impressive is going to happen, and to be in it again next week.
Because the return is the visit. A single visit is a kindness. The second visit is what makes the first one true, and the tenth is when the man stops being a visitor and starts being someone the person in the bed belongs to. The old man did not know the visitor's name. He knew his day. That is the whole thing the forgotten have lost, a person in the world whose week has them in it, and it is restored by nothing but the calendar.
The Two Hard Doors
Christ named the two hardest rooms on purpose, and a man should read why they are hard before he decides he is not the kind who goes in.
"I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me" — Matthew 25:36. The hospital smells like mortality and the prison smells like judgment, and both of them frighten visitors off, which is exactly why a visit counts double in either. The sick man learns his life still touches someone outside his diagnosis. The prisoner learns he is still on somebody's books as a human being and not as a case number. A man does not need answers for either room. He needs to walk in, sit down, and not flinch, and the not flinching is most of what he brings.
Paul had one such visitor, and he put the man's name in a letter so it would not be lost. "May the Lord grant mercy to the household of Onesiphorus, for he often refreshed me and was not ashamed of my chains, but when he arrived in Rome he searched for me earnestly and found me" — 2 Timothy 1:16-17. Searched for me earnestly. Rome was a large city and a prisoner was not easy to find, and a man with a reputation to protect would have had every reason not to look too hard. Onesiphorus looked until he found him, and was not ashamed to be seen going in. Every prison ministry in the country is short of men willing to do exactly that, and the doors are already built. The difficulty is not disqualification. It is the measurement of the need.
No One Cares for My Soul
Read what the loneliness actually is, because the word is used too lightly to describe it.
David, hiding in a cave, wrote the sentence from the inside. "Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul" — Psalm 142:4. None who takes notice. That is the condition of the man at the end of the east wing and the woman whose phone does not ring. It is not that nobody loves them in the abstract. Somebody does, three states away. It is that nobody takes notice, nobody's eyes land on them on a schedule, and a human being who is not noticed for long enough begins to doubt that he is still there. The visitor does not fix that with wisdom or a program. He fixes it by being the one who takes notice, on Wednesdays, which is a sentence small enough to be embarrassing and large enough that the record puts the lack of it in a psalm.
The School Nobody Runs
Here is what nobody warns a man about: he will go in to give and come out having been given to.
The old have already run the experiments the young are still arguing about. Marriage, war, loss, work, money, God. They hand out the results free to anyone who sits still long enough, and a man who spends a year of Wednesdays with a ninety-one-year-old has been to a school no university operates, with a faculty of one who has nothing left to prove and no reason to lie. This does not make the visit a transaction. It makes it what Paul hoped his own visit to Rome would be: "that we may be mutually encouraged by each other's faith, both yours and mine" — Romans 1:12. Mutually. By the tenth visit there is no giver and no receiver in the room, just two men who are less alone than they were, and one of them driving home with a sentence in the truck he did not have that morning.
John ended a letter by refusing to finish it in writing. "I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face" — 3 John 14. Face to face. The apostle had ink and a messenger and chose the chair instead, because some things only cross a room. Nothing a man can mail does what his face in the doorway does.
How Men Stay in the Lot
The man who has nothing to bring. He has a face and a Wednesday and thinks the room requires more. It does not. He is the something, and he has been sitting in the lot for ten minutes working out what to say.
The one-time visitor. He came at Christmas with the church group and felt good about it. The old man does not remember him. The old man remembers the one who comes on Wednesdays.
The man who will not do the hard doors. Hospitals and prisons frighten him, so he has decided they are for other men. They are for the man who walks in and does not flinch, and he could be that man by Thursday.
The man in the east wing. He was Danny for three weeks and did not correct it. Tonight he is the one who comes on Wednesdays. He has never been called anything truer.
Three Questions at the Nurses' Station
TRUTH: Who in my radius has not been noticed on purpose this month? Not who is poor. Who is unvisited: the shut-in, the man in the home, the one inside whose name the outside stopped saying. He knows at least one.
LOVE: Am I going once or going back? A single visit is a kindness that can leave the person lonelier when it does not repeat. If he cannot go back, he should say so. If he can, the second visit is the one that counts.
LAW: Which door am I refusing because it is hard? He is answerable for the hospital and the prison, the two rooms named specifically, and I'm not that kind of man is not an answer the One who named them is recorded as accepting.
He Has Visited His People
A man can do all of this. Take the Wednesday, bring nothing, read the box scores, go back, walk into the hard doors without flinching. He should. The need is the most direct on the hall and the entry requirement is the shortest.
And he should know what a visit is, in the record, before he thinks of it as a small thing. When Zechariah's mouth was opened after nine months of silence, the first thing out of it was a word about God's arrival in the world, and the word he chose was this one. "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people" — Luke 1:68. Visited. The whole gospel is described, by a priest who had just gotten his voice back, as a visit: God coming to where the people were, in a body, so that the forgotten would be noticed by the only One whose notice settles the question. Paul felt the same shape in his own life and said so: "But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus" — 2 Corinthians 7:6. By the coming of a man through a door. The visitor driving home from the east wing has been, for one old man, a small picture of the largest thing that ever happened, and he was first the one visited. He was in a room he could not leave, with no one taking notice, and Someone searched for him earnestly, and found him, and was not ashamed to be seen going in.
Where the East Wing Leads
A man who has stood in this room knows that he is the something, that the return visit is the visit, and that the hard doors count double. He has read the loneliness from the inside in a psalm and found out that the old man's room is a school. He has been known by his day.
The visits in this room run on a schedule, and the person is already known to need one. The next room has no schedule and no sign-up sheet. The need lives within sight of his porch, and it does not announce itself, and nobody is going to organize it for him. It asks for something the first four rooms did not require. It asks him to see.