My grandfather leaves his house at ten forty on Sunday mornings and does not get home until almost six, and he has done it every week for six years, and until this spring not one person in my family knew what he did with those hours.
His name is Emmerich Vantongeren. He’s eighty-one. He lives alone in a one-story rental on Pilcher Street in Bellcourt, Wisconsin, with a kitchen table he refinished himself and a chair nobody sits in.
Two hours northeast of him, at Tamarack Bend Care Center, there’s a woman in the memory unit named Isolde.
She’s seventy-nine. She was his wife for fifty-four years.
She doesn’t know him.
Here’s what he does. He arrives at twelve thirty. He signs the visitor log in the vestibule — printed name, resident’s name, relationship — and in the relationship column, in small square capitals, he writes FRIEND.
He’s written it three hundred and eleven times.
Then he goes down the hall and stands in her doorway and waits to be noticed, because you don’t walk up on her. When she looks over, he says, “Afternoon. I’m going for a drive. Wondered if you’d want to come.”
She almost always says yes. Twice in six years she hasn’t, and both times he sat in the visitors’ lounge until four o’clock in case she changed her mind, and then he drove home.
They go to Dorn’s, a frozen custard stand out on Highway 32 that keeps a hand-lettered board and stays open through October. He gets her butter pecan. Always butter pecan. He has never once asked her what she wants, and I used to think that was the least romantic thing I’d ever heard about a man until I understood that asking her would mean watching her not be able to answer, and he decided a long time ago that she doesn’t have to do that in front of him.
Then he drives her the long way home, out along County Road T where it runs the north shore, because she loves the water. She can’t tell you why. She stopped being able to say why somewhere around 2021. But when the trees break and the lake opens up on the left she goes quiet in a particular way, and her hands come off her lap, and she puts her palm flat against the window glass.
He drives that stretch at about thirty-two miles an hour.
The staff at Tamarack Bend thought for two years that he was a volunteer. He never corrected them. There’s a church group out of Alderbrook that sends people to sit with residents who don’t get visitors, and somebody assumed, and he let the assumption stand, and after a while there were nurses who’d worked that floor eighteen months and knew him by his first name and had no idea.
The word “husband” started frightening her in the spring of 2020.
I don’t know the details of that and I have never asked. What I know is that he came in one Sunday and said it, the way he’d been saying it, and something in her face went to a place he never wanted to see again. So he stopped. He retired the word.
He kept the job.
Sundays. The drive. The butter pecan. The lake. Three hundred and eleven times, in every kind of Wisconsin weather there is, including a February when he put chains on a 2009 Buick at seventy-eight years old in his own driveway because the roads were bad and it was Sunday.
A new aide named Oyin Balogun-Frey started at Tamarack Bend in January. Twenty-six years old, sharp, the kind who actually reads the charts instead of skimming the shift notes. In March she read Isolde’s file all the way through, and then she waited for him in the vestibule.
She asked him — carefully, because she’s a kind person — how he could stand it. Coming all that way. Being forgotten again every single week.
She told me later that he looked genuinely puzzled. Not offended. Puzzled, like she’d gotten a fact wrong and he was trying to locate it.
He said, “She never forgets everything.”
Then he said, “She always picks the passenger seat. Fifty-four years, she never once sat in back.”
Oyin said she had to go stand in the med room for a minute after that.
Because it’s true. He opens the back door and the front door both, every single time, and he stands away from the car and lets her decide, and every single time that woman walks past the open back door and gets in the front.
Some part of her still knows where she belongs.
They hold the spot by the door for him now. Not officially — there’s no sign, and the administrator would tell you there’s no such thing. But it’s empty at twelve fifteen on Sundays, and if somebody’s in it, an aide goes out and moves their car, and nobody has ever put that in writing.
Sundays are held.
I’m Wrenna. I’m forty-one, and Isolde and Emmerich raised me most of the way from nine to seventeen, in a house on the north shore with a porch that looked at the water.
I found out about the drives in February, from a cousin, secondhand, six years in. I asked him about it on the phone and he changed the subject twice and then said, “It’s not a thing, Wrennie. It’s just Sunday.”
I started riding along in March. He didn’t want me to. I came anyway.
And on the fourth Sunday, while he was down the hall doing the doorway thing, Oyin was updating something at the desk and said, without looking up, in the voice you use for small talk:
“You know it’s kind of sweet that he still puts ‘friend.’ Chart’s got him as community visitor anyway.”
I said what.
She said, “Community visitor. Unrelated.” Then she looked up, and saw my face, and stopped. “Wrenna. Her marital status is divorced.“
PART 2
The Kessel County clerk’s office has a public terminal in the corner by the window and it took me nine minutes.
In re the marriage of Vantongeren. Petition filed March 6, 2019. Judgment of divorce entered June 11, 2019. Uncontested. No children under eighteen. Marital settlement agreement attached, twenty-two pages, signed by both parties, hers witnessed by a guardian ad litem because by June of 2019 she could not sign for herself.
Eleven minutes on the record. I ordered the transcript later. It’s four pages long and my grandfather says eight words in it, and one of them is “yes,” four times.
Fifty-four years, ended in a room with nobody in it.
I want to say what I thought first, because I’m not going to come out of this looking good. I sat at that terminal and I thought: he left her. For about ninety seconds I let myself believe that the man who taught me to drive had waited until his wife couldn’t understand it and then walked out the legal back door, and that everything else — the custard, the lake, the passenger seat — was a guilty man buying himself something.
Then I read the settlement agreement.
He didn’t take anything. He took a 2009 Buick, his tools, and eleven thousand dollars. Everything else in that marriage went to her side of the ledger and then straight through her side of the ledger into a care bill.
Then I understood what I was actually looking at, and I’ve since had it explained to me properly by a woman who does this for a living, so I’ll say it the way she says it.
When one spouse goes into a nursing home, the state doesn’t look at that person’s money. It looks at the couple’s money. The one still at home is allowed to keep a certain amount and not a dollar more, and everything above that line has to be spent on care before the state pays anything. There are legal ways to protect the spouse at home — a written refusal to contribute, certain annuities — and each of them has a catch, and in 2019 my grandfather sat in an office in Neenah and got told what the catches were.
The refusal works, and then the state has the right to turn around and sue the refusing spouse for every dollar it spends. Which, at eight thousand a month for a woman who was seventy-three and physically healthy, is a number that ends with an eighty-one-year-old man being sued into the ground with nothing left to sue him for.
So the attorney laid out the other option, the one nobody puts on a brochure, and he took it.
He unmarried her.
Not because he stopped. Because a divorce court divides property in one clean stroke, and after that stroke there is no “couple’s money,” there’s her money and his money, and hers went where it was always going to go and his was eleven thousand dollars and a Buick.
That’s why he writes FRIEND in the relationship column.
It isn’t modesty. It isn’t a kindness to her. It’s the only true word available to him. On every document at Tamarack Bend, Emmerich Vantongeren is a man with no legal relationship to the woman in room 22.
I got to the parking lot before the second thing landed, and I had to put a hand on the hood of my own car.
The long way. Past the lake.
County Road T runs the whole north shore, and there are eleven houses on that stretch, and I have eaten birthday cake in one of them. The porch. The steps down to the dock that were always going to get fixed.
I went home and pulled the property record and it was right there, public, four dollars.
Sold August 14, 2019. Two hundred and sixty-one thousand dollars.
Every Sunday for six years my grandfather has driven his ex-wife past their own house at thirty-two miles an hour, and she puts her hand on the glass because she loves the water, and he has never once said a word about it, and he does not vary the route.
I sat in my kitchen for a long time.
Then, because I’d started and couldn’t stop, I opened a map, and I did the thing I should have done in February.
Tamarack Bend is one hundred and eight miles from Pilcher Street. Two hours and four minutes each way, more in winter.
There are three licensed memory care units inside twenty minutes of my grandfather’s front door. Ridgewick. St. Odile’s. The Halloran House.
I called all three the next morning and asked the same question. In the spring of 2019, did you have availability in your memory unit?
Ridgewick had a bed open from February through July.
He drives four hours and eight minutes round trip, every week, past a house he sold, to see a woman he legally isn’t married to, at a facility two hours away, when there was a bed eleven minutes from his kitchen the entire time.
He didn’t choose that distance.
Somebody chose it for him.
PART 3
My uncle Dewitt lives in Marchford, nine minutes from Tamarack Bend. He’s fifty-six, he’s my grandmother’s son, and he and my grandfather have not been in a room together since 2019.
I always assumed that was about the divorce. Everybody assumed that. It’s the only thing anybody in my family has ever said about it, in the low voice you use at funerals: Well, Deed took it hard.
I drove up on a Tuesday and told him I’d read the file.
He let me in. He put a redweld folder on the kitchen table and said, “Which file.”
I said the divorce. The house. The distance.
He sat down and he said, “Wrenna, I’m the guardian.”
Petition filed April 2019. Deed Vantongeren, appointed guardian of the person of Isolde Vantongeren, by order of the Kessel County Circuit Court, unopposed.
Unopposed because there was nobody with standing to oppose it. By April her husband was a petitioner in a divorce action and by June he was a stranger, and a stranger doesn’t get served.
I asked him why he’d taken it.
And my uncle Deewit, who I have thought of my entire adult life as the son who didn’t come around, pushed the folder across the table and said, “Because she made me.”
Inside was a capacity assessment from October 2018 and a fourteen-page transcript of an elder law consultation, both parties present, recorded with consent.
She was still herself in October 2018. Diminished — the report says mild-to-moderate, says she knew the date, the year, the president, her own diagnosis, says she was “oriented, articulate, and unambiguous as to her wishes.”
She ran that meeting.
It’s all there. She’s the one who asks about the five-year lookback. She’s the one who asks what happens to Em if the state comes after him. When the attorney explains the divorce option, my grandfather says — and it’s in the transcript, and I’ve read it maybe forty times — “Absolutely not. No.”
And she says: “Emmerich. Don’t be stupid about this. You’ll be here after.”
Then she asks for Deewit to be appointed instead of him. Specifically. On the record. Her reason, verbatim: “Because someday somebody’s going to have to decide something for me that he can’t live with deciding. Don’t make him do it. He’ll do it, and it’ll finish him.”
And then she gives the instruction that is the actual reason for everything.
She asks how far away the placement should be.
The attorney says most families want as close as possible.
And my grandmother says: “No. Far enough that he can’t come every day.”
I made Deewit read it out loud. He didn’t want to. I made him.
Far enough that he can’t come every day. Because he will. He’ll come every day and he’ll sit there and he’ll watch it happen an inch at a time and there’ll be nothing left of him by the end of it. Give him a drive. Give him something he has to plan. And make it one day, Deed. Make it Sunday. Sunday was always ours.
She picked the distance. She measured out her own husband’s grief in miles and gave him a dose he could survive, and then she made her son the one who’d have to enforce it and take the blame for it for six years without ever explaining himself.
I said, why didn’t you tell him.
Deewit said, “She told me not to. She said if he knew she’d arranged it he’d feel managed, and he’d come every day just to prove he could, and then we’d be right back where she was trying to keep him out of.”
I asked if he’d ever regretted it.
He said, “Every Sunday of my life. I watch that Buick go by my road at twelve twenty and I’ve never once flagged him down.”
I stayed four hours. He showed me the whole file. And near the back, clipped behind the guardianship order, there was one more page from that same October afternoon, and it’s the only part where the transcript notes that she stopped and had to be given a minute.
She’d asked about the late stages. What happens. What she’d be like.
The attorney had said, gently, that some people become distressed when someone insists on a relationship they can’t verify — that a claim like I’m your husband can frighten a person who has no way to check it.
And she said: “Then don’t. Em, listen to me. When it gets there, don’t tell her who you are. Tell her you’re a friend.”
She picked the word.
Two years before he ever wrote it in that column, she sat in an office in Neenah and handed it to him.
I drove home shaking, and I called him that night, and I got no answer, and I got no answer Wednesday, and on Thursday morning Deewit called me from an ambulance.
PART 4
Deewit had a bleed in the right basal ganglia on the seventeenth of April. He’s alive. He is not going to be anybody’s guardian again.
A guardianship doesn’t pause because the guardian collapses. The court gets notified, and the court appoints a successor, and there was no successor named, and there was no family member who both lived close enough and could pass a bond check, and my mother has been in Arizona since 2011.
So on May 2nd the Kessel County Circuit Court appointed the office of the county corporation counsel’s designated public guardian, a woman named Saoirse Pettibone-Achebe, who is competent and overworked and has, I am told, ninety-four wards.
She got Isolde’s file the way you get the ninety-fifth of anything. And she did the correct thing, which was a full review.
And on the review, in the column for community visitors, was a man with no legal relationship to the resident who signed in every Sunday and removed her from the licensed facility, unaccompanied, for approximately four hours, and returned her — with no signed off-site authorization anywhere in the chart, ever, because for six years the authorization had been a verbal one from a guardian who is now in a rehabilitation bed in Appleton.
She suspended the outings on May 9th. A form letter to the facility. Two sentences.
He found out at twelve thirty on Sunday the eleventh, standing in the vestibule with his pen in his hand.
They didn’t stop him from visiting. He could sit in the lounge. He could not take her out of the building.
He sat in the lounge for four hours. He’d brought the butter pecan in a cooler bag with ice packs because it’s a two-hour drive and he’s been doing it that way since 2019 for the Sundays it rains too hard to sit outside at Dorn’s, and it went soft, and he threw it away in the parking lot.
Then he drove two hours home.
He did that on the eleventh and the eighteenth and the twenty-fifth.
On the twenty-fifth Oyin called me at nine at night, crying, and said, “He’s not talking to her anymore. He sits there and he holds the cup and he doesn’t say anything. Wrenna, he’s stopped.”
I got an attorney. Imogene Kasprzak-Bell, fifty-two, elder law, and the first thing she told me on the phone was the thing that has kept me up since.
There’s a statute. When a guardian denies or unreasonably restricts contact, a person can petition the court for a visitation order.
And the statute lists who can file.
A spouse. An adult child. A parent. An adult sibling. An adult grandchild.
He’s none of them. He unmarried himself to keep from bankrupting her care, and in doing so he removed his own name from the only list that would have let him fight for her. He has no standing. He cannot walk into that courtroom as a party. He can’t even be served with the papers.
I’m an adult grandchild.
The only person on this earth who can go to court for Emmerich Vantongeren is a woman who found out he was doing any of this six weeks ago, secondhand, from a cousin.
I filed on June 3rd. Hearing set for July 22nd.
We had the visitor log — three hundred and eleven Sundays, photocopied, and I paid Tamarack Bend forty-one dollars for the copies. We had Deewit’s file, and the 2018 transcript, and a letter from his neurologist saying he could not testify. We had Oyin, who agreed to give a statement and who I had to tell, twice, that this could cost her the job.
Ten days before the hearing, the public guardian filed her response.
It was four pages and it was not unkind and it was worse for being reasonable. Liability. No documented authorization. A resident with advanced dementia leaving a secured unit in a private vehicle with an unrelated adult.
And then paragraph nine.
On June 19th, in the course of her required in-person visit, Ms. Pettibone-Achebe had asked the resident directly, in the presence of a staff member unaffiliated with the petitioner, whether she knew the man who came on Sundays.
The resident said no.
Asked whether she wished to continue going out with him, the resident did not respond.
Under the statute, a guardian may restrict contact when the protected person states to the guardian and one other unaffiliated person that she does not wish to have contact with a particular individual.
They had it on the record.
She’d said no.
PART 5
The hearing took an hour and fifty minutes on a Tuesday morning in a courtroom with eleven people in it.
Imogene did not argue that my grandmother was wrong. That was the whole strategy and I fought her about it for a week. You cannot go into a guardianship court and tell a judge that a woman with advanced dementia doesn’t mean what she says; the entire architecture of that room is built on taking her seriously.
So we did the opposite. We took her completely seriously — in October 2018, when she was oriented, articulate, and unambiguous, and had a lawyer, and a transcript, and a witness.
Imogene put the 2018 transcript in as a statement of the ward’s own previously expressed wishes, made with capacity, and read the passage about Sundays out loud, and then the passage about the distance, and then the passage where she tells him to say he’s a friend.
The public guardian, to her credit, stopped objecting halfway through and just listened.
Then Oyin testified. Twenty-six years old, in a blazer she’d clearly bought that week, and Imogene asked her one question, which was to describe what happens at the car.
She said: he opens the back door. Then he opens the front door. Then he steps back about four feet and puts his hands in his pockets and he doesn’t say anything, and he never touches her, and she walks past the back door and gets in the front.
Imogene asked if she’d ever seen the resident choose the back seat.
Oyin said no. Not once. Not in two years.
The judge asked her one question of his own. He asked whether the resident had ever, in her presence, appeared frightened of the man.
Oyin said, “She holds his sleeve in the parking lot. She’s done it every Sunday since I started.”
The order came down eleven days later.
Supervised at first — a staff member in the car for the first four outings, at the facility’s rate, which we paid. After that, a standing visitation order: Sundays, twelve thirty to four thirty, one named individual, with off-site authorization written into the plan of care so it can’t evaporate again when a guardian changes.
Everybody at Tamarack Bend calls it the Sunday order. It’s in a binder at the front desk.
I want to be honest about the cost, because I’ve read a lot of stories like this one and they always end at the good part.
He missed eleven Sundays.
She lost more ground in those eleven weeks than in the whole year before them, and nobody can tell me whether the two things are connected, and the neurologist said the word “coincidental” in a tone that suggested she didn’t fully believe it either. She stopped using his name in October, and she’d been using it maybe once a month before that, so I don’t know what that’s worth.
Deewit is in a facility in Appleton. He gets one good hour in the afternoon. My grandfather goes on Wednesdays now — the two of them, who hadn’t spoken since 2019, sitting in a dayroom not saying much.
The house on the north shore belongs to a family from Rockford who put in a new dock. It’s gone. It was always going to be gone. That was the entire point of it being gone.
And the divorce is permanent. There is no undoing it, and no reason to; if they remarried tomorrow the state’s arithmetic would come back and eat what’s left of him. My grandmother’s death certificate is going to say she was single and it is going to be a lie of exactly the kind she designed.
The first Sunday back was the ninth of August.
I drove up because I couldn’t not. I stood by the doors with Oyin and we watched him do the doorway thing, and then the two of them came out into the lot at twelve forty, her hand on his sleeve, and the spot by the door was empty because it is always empty at twelve fifteen.
He put the cooler bag in the back.
Then he opened the back door.
Then he opened the front door.
Then he stepped away from the car about four feet and put his hands in his pockets and didn’t say a word, the way he has three hundred and twelve times, and he waited.
She stood there a long moment in the sun with her hand still up like his sleeve was there.
And she looked at the back seat, and she looked at the front.
And she got in the front.
