They always come in 3s...

...I just didn't think it would be 3 days in a row of hearing that people I know and loved have died. Ugh. On my way home from my Uncle Ted's funeral last night, my good friend Emma called. Emma works at Sunrise Assisted Living, where I worked for 6 years (2 of those years were in Minnetonka, where Emma still works). Emma always kept me up to date about one of my favorite residents - Pat. Emma let me know last night that they weren't expecting Pat to live very much longer. I found out today that Emma got a call from Sunrise 4 minutes after she got off of the phone with me that he had passed away.

Pat was a great guy. He was by far one of my favorite people all of the Sunrises that I worked at. He lived in the dementia neighborhood, but I always felt like we clicked right away. The day he moved in, he was not wanting to take his medication. I was getting ready to walk out of the door at the end of my workday, when my co-worker came up to ask me if I could give them a hand in trying to get him to take his meds. I came up to his room where he was acting out and agitated and sat down next to him. He looked over at me and smiled really big - I'm pretty sure he liked my red coat. He calmed down and took his meds for me, and went along his merry way.

Pat always had a hard time being understood when he was trying to express himself. The words he would say would come out strangely, but he would still smile at us like we understood what he was saying. He was one of the few people there with dementia who still knew how to read. One day, he came up to me and my friend Nicole and was reading our name badges. He looked at mine and said, "Rat-chel", and then looked at hers and said, "Nicoloy". So ever since that day some of my friends have called my Ratchel. A few months later I was walking down the hall when I came upon Pat with his shoe untied. I bent down to tie his shoe and he asked me who I was. I told him my name was Rachel, and he said, "Ah, Rainsaw". So that was my other nickname there.

When I was having a bad day, I would often times go up to Pat's room to see his smile. Anyone who knew Pat knew that he smiled with his WHOLE face. He had the biggest grin that would always put me in a better mood. He would talk to me, and while most of his words didn't make sense, every once in a while I'd catch a statement that would make me laugh because it made sense in a roundabout kind of way.

There are so many stories that I have about Pat. But they don't do any justice in written words, they are stories you have to hear to appreciate. I know that I will remember these stories for a long, long time. I hope that when I grow old I can make people smile the way that Pat did.

No more of these phone calls for a while, okay God??