WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — By ninth grade, the year Jerry Bando first felt butterflies for the then-MaryLou Vient, she already knew she was going to become a nurse. She’d known that for years, ever since she saw her cousin in a military nurse’s uniform, and something clicked.
What she didn’t yet know was that the other part of her future was not ahead of her, exactly — he was right next to her, seated one desk over from hers, in Mr. Finley’s geometry class in Quincy, Mass. After more than 60 years of marriage to Jerry, the latter decades of which they spent living in the Upper Valley, MaryLou Bando died in February, at age 83, of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
“I still can’t believe Mr. Finley put me next to her,” Jerry laughed during an interview last week with members of the Bando family, in his White River Junction home. He’d had a crush on MaryLou for a while, drawn — like everyone else in their high school — to her light. “She was always laughing, always surrounded by a circle of friends. She attracted people. Everyone wanted to be around her.”
MaryLou was fun, no doubt about it — the kind of person to cut up the rug at a record hop, or sing silly songs in the car, or careen down a too-steep hill on a toboggan only to wipe out in an explosion of snow, laughing — but she was also driven, saving every penny from her babysitting and bakery jobs to put toward her nursing degree.
But it wasn’t just the uniform that drew MaryLou into nursing. Mostly, it was that taking care of others was in her bones: Born the middle of 13 children, MaryLou found herself in charge of her younger siblings at an early age. But even then, she went beyond the basics — like when Tiny the dog, who everyone had thought was male, gave birth to puppies.
“MaryLou took all the puppies, gave them baths, scrubbed them all up,” and tucked the whole squirming litter into a stroller to take them for walks, Jerry laughed. Such was her caregiving style, whether it was for puppies, her own children and all their rough-and-tumble neighborhood friends, or the countless patients she worked with in her nursing career — from ranchers out in middle-of-nowhere Wyoming, to a children’s clinic where she tested for allergies. After moving to the Upper Valley in the 1990s, she worked at the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, and as a substitute school nurse at Marion Cross School in Norwich.
“It fulfilled her sense of purpose,” said Joan Bando, MaryLou’s daughter, who lives in Peterborough, N.H.
“That, and motherhood.”
It was a good thing, too. She and Jerry had six kids in rapid succession — including two sets of twins — and she had to step back from nursing for some years. In the meantime, the family spent much of their child-rearing years moving around the country with Jerry’s job at a commercial microwave company.
“It wasn’t all perfect,” Jerry acknowledged. There were work opportunities that didn’t pan out the way they’d hoped, and it could be hard for the kids to leave behind their friends, many of whom had sat on MaryLou’s kitchen counter, getting patched up after a spill. “But through it all, she did what needed to be done. She took care of us all. And she never complained. She always said yes.”
It might not have been perfect. But, to hear the Bando kids tell it, those were the best of times: the swimming lessons she made them take even after watching Jaws, the birthday cakes she decorated with things like matchbox cars, the dinners of homemade Italian meatballs, the tortellini she’d pinch painstakingly into shape, the station wagon loaded up with camping gear or inner tubes or skis for eight people until the tail end of it sagged like a lopsided ship, the elaborate Halloween costumes that were months in the making — really, the elaborate Halloweens, period. MaryLou would host parties dressed up like a fortune-teller, passing around peeled grape “eyeballs” and other faux macabre items, her joie de vivre lighting up the dimly lit room.
“She’d tell these scary stories,” recalled her daughter, Ann Appleton, of Littleton, Mass. “Like, ‘Barney dug up a body today… and oooh, here’s the body!’ ” Barney was the family dog, one of many critters — including cats, gerbils, toads, parakeets, snakes, turtles and fish — whose presence in the Bando house MaryLou took in stride. To her, opening the closet door and finding a crispy husk of shedded snakeskin was just another adventure.
And she always said yes to adventure. She craved it, ever since she was a child, and would hole up in her attic bedroom with the stacks of National Geographic magazines her parents stored up there. She’d jump at the chance to take an impromptu camping weekend, or a roadtrip to a national park, at the drop of a hat.
“If someone suggested we go to Montreal, in 15 minutes we’d be in the car on our way,” laughed Jerry. “She was always ready.”
But it wasn’t enough for her just to see, for example, the Grand Canyon. She wanted to take in as much of its vastness as she could. Jerry recalled their visit going something along these lines: “Well, we’re at the Grand Canyon, let’s helicopter to the bottom. And now that we’re at the bottom, let’s horseback ride even deeper. And now that we’re even deeper, let’s climb down a 200 foot cliff to get to this swimming hole.”
MaryLou knew that where the helicopter stopped — and where most people stop exploring — wasn’t really the bottom at all. She knew that if you’re brave enough, what initially seems like the bottom of something is only its beginning.
“Of course, she’d still play the short card with me in the helicopter,” Jerry added. MaryLou was maybe five feet tall. “She’d look at me with those brown eyes, and what could I do? At the movie theater, I was always the one sitting behind the guy with the big head.”
Plumbing depths was not just MaryLou’s way with canyons, though, but also with people, including the patients she worked with. Her daughter Ellen Bando, who lives in Randolph and now works in health care, said she was inspired by her mother’s dedication. She was the kind of nurse who would stay late at the hospital to bathe someone who needed it, or to hold the hand of someone who knew they were dying, or sit with someone going through chemotherapy who never had any visitors.
It was work that came with a heavy emotional load, but MaryLou had the right disposition for it, said her son Pete, who lives in Manchester, N.H. “She didn’t come home and cry for hours if somebody died,” he said. “She’d say, ‘Boy, he was a really nice man. I’m really glad I got to work with him.’ ”
She did have a healthy tolerance for the macabre — like with her Halloween parties, and with her vampire soap operas, which Pete said no one was allowed to change, even if she fell asleep mid-episode, exhausted after a long shift at the hospital, or from the classes she squeezed in between her duties. Some of those classes were directly related to her nursing goals, like the Spanish she learned to help work through language barriers with patients. Others, like the voice lessons she took in her 30s, or her tap dance classes or her gourmet cooking club classes, were for her.
“She just loved to learn,” Joan recalled. “She was an avid bookworm.”
And so it seems particularly cruel that Alzheimer’s disease, which robs an individual of her knowledge and memories, would strike someone who was always looking to feed her mind.
The symptoms started out fairly innocuous, as they tend to. A misplaced spatula, a name unable to be retrieved. But it progressed into more pronounced memory loss, including scary and painful delusions, like the day of her and Jerry’s golden wedding anniversary, when she thought — after 50 years of hot air balloon rides and over-stuffed car trunks and long nightly chats in the kitchen over wine — that Jerry had divorced her.
“It slowly but surely invades your life,” Jerry said, “until all of a sudden you’re in the palliative care center, and you see your sweet wife, bloated with medication and unable to communicate that she’s having trouble breathing. … It hurt, seeing her kind of lose her light.”
But even when it got to the point where there were maybe two restaurants Carole Bando felt comfortable taking her mother to, MaryLou still had her moments. At Four Aces Diner, in West Lebanon, “she would greet every single person in the restaurant,” said Carole, who lives in Sharon. “She’d go up to the diners and hold their faces and tell them they were beautiful.”
At first, Carole was worried people would be put off by MaryLou’s forwardness. “But then, people who she hadn’t interacted with would come over to meet her. Even as far as she was into her disease, she was reaching them. And they were coming over to be reached,” Carole said.
It happened at the grocery store with Jerry, too, like the time MaryLou needed her shoelace tied, and Jerry was struggling to lower himself. With unexpected tenderness, a store employee — who Jerry described as typically gruff — bent down and tied MaryLou’s shoe. In the same store a few weeks later, when MaryLou insisted on using the men’s restroom and not the women’s, the same employee hung a “closed for cleaning” sign on the men’s room door to ensure her privacy.
“This was how she affected gruff guys,” Jerry said, tearing up a little.
“Dad,” Appleton said. “Don’t you know gruff guys were her specialty?”
In the end, MaryLou found herself on the other side of the role she’d always known she was meant to play: She had spent her whole life taking care of others, at home and at work, from way out west to White River Junction. Now, it was Jerry’s turn to take care of her.
And he did. When he was worried about her breathing, he’d lay his head by hers and listen for the in and out of air. And when she looked beautiful holding a bouquet of flowers, he would tell her so, and take her picture. And when she asked about her dog named Tiny, he’d tell her again about the puppies.
And sometimes, when the hospital staff came by and she was feeling chatty, she’d smile at them and say, “Hi, who are you? I’m MaryLou. I used to be a nurse, too.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at emmajeanholley@gmail.com.