By Tina Teng-Henson

Continued from Part 1–>

L. asked us to start at her office. She described the things she’d noticed there – the turning of the chair towards the door or away from the desk in the morning, even though she’d leave it turned inward before going home at the end of the day. The way she’d sometimes be sitting there focusing on her activity plan for the building, and all of a sudden, the two doves hanging from slender strands of fishing line would start spinning around in circles. And so forth.

So we started there. The small closet had no windows, and felt overly full with a variety of props, packed to the gills with supplies, decor, memorabilia, photos, work. It felt stuffy, so a fan had been installed that was aimed over her desk to circulate the air. I asked her at some point whether there was another office space that could have been hers. Was there some lingering resentment about wanting to have another space? No, she wanted this room. That wasn’t it. 

Anyway, it did feel a bit off. Cramped, stuffy, but we did our best to listen for what was going on in that space, speak into those realities, bring the presence of Christ, and pray. 

I’d learned from the sister facility’s activities director that Father Jeremiah had gone there and blessed the building by anointing the furniture in each affected room with oil. But on the day that he had gone, there was no special oil. There was just olive oil. So they went with that. 

I brought some skin oil a friend from my Buy Nothing Facebook group had given me – that had Vitamin E in it. It was a generic brand; it probably came from CVS a long time ago. I poured some into two little plastic travel bottles that were clear, so you could see what was inside. That way, there was nothing mysterious. It was just oil typically used for moisturizing the body after bathing. 

Let me come back to the story. We blessed L’s office, because she asked us to start there. She had to go about her business – there was a tour group coming thru later that day, which we encountered briefly on our way out – so she entrusted the work to us. 

After blessing her little office, we did that whole wing. We carried the lit candle we’d first lit in L’s office into the hallway, dropped all our stuff off atop a couch, and just proceeded to every doorway – touching the corners of doorframes with the oil – as we prayed and spoke to whoever might be listening in. Rubin made the sign of the cross on the doors, and so eventually, I decided to do the same. It reminded me of how the early Christians in Rome made the sign of the fish to signal where they were meeting. It also reminded me of how the Hebrews marked their doors in Exodus with blood so that the angel of death would pass over their home and spare their firstborn sons. In that spirit, we made our way through that wing and eventually made it into the activities room at the center of the building, opposite the dining area.

There, L at some point told me she had been facing the large-screen TV, and had felt two hands press down on her shoulders. I asked her if there was any way that was intended to be a comforting thing, perhaps? If that had happened to me, I think I might have appreciated it – my sore neck and shoulders being what they are these days! I don’t sense that was her first impression. It seemed like it threw her off. 

She said around this time that she was convinced Ziggy, one of their former residents, was still in the building. He had been an incredible musician, and she mentioned all the different genres of music he could play. I can’t remember now what she said. For whatever reason, she sensed he was still around. We didn’t actually get to address him by name directly, but this was one of the three distinct people she mentioned specifically that stood out to us. (Continue to Part 3–>)

Tina Teng-Henson serves as a spiritual director and hospice chaplain. As a wife and mother of three, she occasionally guest-preaches and teaches. When she’s not volunteering at her children’s schools, she plays volleyball, reads, and writes.