She walks the halls each day among forgotten men—so forgotten, most of them cannot even remember themselves. They are the Alzheimer’s patients at the veteran’s home in St. Cloud.

When at long last a soldier’s fight ends, the body is bagged, placed on a gurney and wheeled away. “It feels like we’re just taking out the trash,” one registered nurse said at a staff meeting.

Somehow she is able to visualize the men they once were, and even from deep inside that prison of fog and flesh, they know they have her respect, her compassion. They know.

Her paycheck was larger her annual review, but she checked with the supervisor to make sure it wasn’t some kind of mistake. Her supervisor is retiring soon. “It’s the first time in all those years that I ranked one of my nurses as “outstanding,” she said. “Congratulations on the bonus; you earned it.”

So, maybe it was not surprising that this outstanding nurse’s suggestion was approved. All bodies were henceforth to be draped with a flag. A small thing, perhaps, but something. “After all, they have given so much,” she said.

It was a typical day when the next man passed away. Men sat in wheelchairs in the hall. Others slouched lost in thought or in the absence of it. Nurses and physicians hustled back and forth. But when that flag-draped gurney appeared with the man’s family walking behind, one of the old veterans saw the flag, leapt to his feet and instinctively barked, “Attention!”

And up and down the hall, as if this were some miraculous awakening, one by one, men rose, stood crisply at attention and saluted smartly as the gurney went past. They remembered they were soldiers.

Can you imagine what it meant to the family? Can you imagine? And when the gurney was gone, the old soldier barked again: “At ease!” Slowly, the men slumped back to where they were. Back into the fog. The staff watched in amazement.

There was not a dry eye in the place.

When the family of the soldier who had barked the orders came to visit a few days later, the nurse shared the story. When the next visitors came, she urged him to tell the story. They argued back and forth good naturedly, but he won out. “You tell it,” he beamed. “I like the way you tell it.”

Curious, isn’t it, how one small thing can become so great? “Oh, I just feel like I found my calling,” she told me when I called last week, as if that was any explanation at all. Maybe these events are not extraordinary, but the way she sees the world is, and that is where the magic comes in. She told me how much she loved a job most of us couldn’t do.

I responded with a few sentences in a choppy, uneven cadence. I paused. Swallowed hard. “I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of you,” I told my sister.

That was all I could get out.

There was not a dry eye in the place.

© Tony Bender, 2011