A Special Mothers Day Tribute
Winter, 1984 — Loretta Pettit leaves the Nobby Grill promptly at 4 p.m. and drives to her small Northgate Village apartment to change out of her waitress uniform.
Just inside the apartment door, she is greeted by a framed picture of Randy that sits on a stack of imitation-wood shelves. Randy’s eyes and wavy, black hair shine in the photographer’s light and his cheeks have sun in them. A loud shirt with its thick, seventies collar make him look more like a TV star than a junior high school student.
Loretta, at just over five feet tall (not counting her Bouffant hair), walks into the bedroom and comes out wearing a flannel shirt, rolled-up blue jeans, and thick-soled shoes. She glances at her watch and starts moving about more quickly. After slipping on a down coat and grabbing a canvas bag filled with items she had packed the night before, she makes a beeline to her small, white sedan in the parking lot.
“I didn’t even have a driver’s license before Randy got sick,” she says with her head tilted up to see over the steering wheel. Her brother-in-law, Clarence, and her minister taught her how to drive.
On the hour or so drive from Northgate Village in Marion to the Anderson Mental Health Care Center, Loretta peppers the conversation with observations about Highway 9, a road she has traveled hundreds of times since Randy was admitted to the facility — a section of pavement that felt even bumpier after they resurfaced it… a lawn that she always thought was beautiful… an accident that she had happened upon sometime in the past.
.
Hard to believe it had been eleven years since Randy fell ill. Just prior to his 13th birthday, he was at home with Loretta after spending the day with friends. Randy began to feel intense stomach pain with vomiting and passed out before the ambulance arrived. He had gone into cardiac arrest. Loretta sat with Randy in the hospital for weeks and nothing seemed to be working. His brain had been permanently injured.
“Actually,” she is quick to point out, “his brain is fine; he just can’t make his body do what his brain tells it to do.”
Randy had seen more therapists than Loretta could remember, but he still lacked the ability to do much more than extend his limbs slightly and awkwardly, and force out a barely recognizable semblance of the words “hi” and “mom.”
“It has been very frustrating for me sometimes,” Loretta admits. “I spend more time with Randy than anybody and I know there’s a bunch of stuff going on in his head. I pray that someday God will restore whatever it is that is blocking his body from his brain.”
In spite of the limited results, the therapy is expensive and government assistance, while available on paper, is nearly impossible to access.
“There was one therapist — I’m not kidding — who probably would have had Randy standing up by now. But every time he would start getting somewhere, the checks would stop coming in from Indianapolis,” she says with surprisingly little inflection in her voice. “It seems like every six to eight months I’m driving down there to raise Cain, but all they can tell me is that something is getting messed up in the bookkeeping.”
Randy and Loretta came to Marion from Kentucky when he was a baby. She had just gotten divorced and wanted to move closer to her sister, Anna Mary, and Clarence. “They are my best friends. Them and my preacher,” she says.
The longest Loretta has been away from Randy in eleven years is one week, when she went on a church trip (she called it a vacation). “I made sure my sister went to see him while I was gone,” she says.
Loretta enters the large double doors at the front of the Anderson facility, making stops along the hallway to greet and check on several senior citizens she has become friendly with since Randy moved in. She knows that Randy will be waiting for her in the cafeteria, where wheelchairs are lined up around a large stainless steel food table in the white sterile room.
There are no other visitors in sight, and Loretta’s entrance causes a number of the residents to cry or yell — some with joy. One boy begins singing “Here to see your baby” over and over again until an aide makes him stop.
Loretta seems relieved that she has made it to the cafeteria in time to take Randy back to his room for dinner, which management allows her to do.
At age 25, Randy’s arms and legs are thin and bony. His cheeks and eyes are sunk in beneath his trademark black hair, which is still healthy as ever. He labors to raise his stiff, shaking arms and bent-in wrist toward Loretta. She moves quickly across the cafeteria and into Randy’s arms, sliding her small hands between his back and the wheelchair.
In his room, Loretta begins spoon-feeding Randy, sometimes having to tug on the spoon to get it out of his clenched jaws. “That’s good stuff, ain’t that right, Randy,” she says lovingly.
“I am always wondering if he knows how long he’s been in here,” she says as Randy takes in the last spoonful. I know he remembers everything before the attack because when I talk about things back then he smiles back at me — like when I tell him I’ve run into one of his old friends at the Nobby.”
After dinner, Loretta reaches into the canvas bag and pulls out a wash rag, soap, powder, deodorant, lotion, a tube of Brylcreem, a razor and shaving cream, after-shave lotion and a clean pair of cotton pajamas.
“He lets me know if I forget the after-shave,” she says smiling.
Throughout Randy’s room, Loretta has left post-it notes instructing the nursing staff on his needs and preferences, right down to his favorite TV shows. She has printed his name with black marker on every single piece of his clothing, including a pair of Converse tennis shoes, which have the toes cut out of them. “I asked the therapist if I could do that because I could see on his face that his feet were hurting,” she explained.
While Loretta steps out to get Randy his evening Sprite, Randy’s roommate, Terri, comes back to the room. He’s a 21-year-old who looks more like 13. Loretta appears glad to see him, and she feeds the two men Oreo cookies while combing through Randy’s hair with her free hand.
As the evening winds down — for what seems like a very long time — Loretta and Randy stare into each other’s eyes without making a sound. He is relaxed and droopy eyed by the time she gives him a final sip of Sprite from a straw.
Loretta pulls the sheets over Randy’s chest, kisses him on the cheek and gathers her things for the ride back to Marion.
“I’ll be back tomorrow night,” she says in full voice. “Weather permitting.”
Writer’s Note, 2022:
While Randy ultimately got to move to facilities nearer to Loretta’s home, the routine described in this article went on almost daily for nearly a half-century. Loretta died in January of this year — less than two years after her son. Randy was becoming terminally ill during the COVID scare, and Loretta was told that she could not return to the nursing home if she left. She told them to make her a bed. For about three weeks, Loretta was by his side until he took his final breath, a moment also shared with her beloved niece and ally, Linda, Clarence and Anna Mary's daughter.
In our last conversation, Loretta mentioned in passing that she had said goodnight to Randy's photo the night before, and that she could not wait to see him in Heaven.
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