Correction:
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described a doctor’s specialty. Nathan Zasler is a specialist in brain-injury medicine, not a neurologist. This version has been corrected.
“At that point, it was like the dream died,” Page recalls. “It was very hard, because when Robert came home, you have this not-even-rational thought that, ‘If I just love him enough, he’ll get better.’ ”
There are not many brain-injury patients at assisted-living facilities, not many healthy 46-year-olds bounding around with lots of energy. So the Meltons had to make it up as they went along when Robert entered Brighton Gardens in Richmond.
The first year was difficult. Robert’s presence unsettled the older, feebler residents. He would complain to Page that bingo was boring or that there wasn’t much to do. He struggled with his temper.
But, over time, the routine began to ease Robert’s anxieties and help him function.
A checklist on his medicine cabinet, “Robert’s Recipe for a Handsome Husband,” reminded him to shower, shampoo and shave, and caregivers — as well as a companion Page hired to provide stimulation — helped him accomplish those tasks. He ate meals at the same table with the same group of men, all decades older than he.
Eventually, he started to embrace the activities — from beading to Bible studies, even bingo — and slowly his irritability evolved into a warm, jolly nature.
“At some point, he just gave himself up to it,” Page says. “And that was huge to me, because I was beating myself up about the fact that he wasn’t at home anymore.”
Page visited Robert every day at first and eventually every other day, and the girls came for lunch every Saturday. When Brighton Gardens was sold to another company, Robert moved to Sunrise along with much of the staff, which had grown to love him and his family.
Today, he looks healthy and fit, and walks with confidence. Page makes sure he dresses well, and glasses at the end of his nose still give him a professorial look. But within seconds of meeting him, it’s clear his mind is impaired. It’s hard to know how much he comprehends, even when he answers a question. Conversations are limited and disjointed.
He sometimes latches onto the sounds of words rather than their meaning — saying, “Give my regards to Broadway,” for instance, when he’s told a friend “sends his regards.” He often falls back on stock phrases or song lyrics.
The most striking thing about Robert is his personality. Once reserved and a bit aloof, Robert today is talkative and exuberant. He seems to spill over with wide-eyed joy and gratitude. He calls everyone “darlin’ ” or “babe” or “bro.’”
“Mabel, I cannot thank you enough for that toilet tissue,” he’d say to the short Colombian woman who cleaned his room at Sunrise.
His outsize gregariousness — a reflection of an “organic personality disorder,” says Nathan Zasler, his brain injury medicine specialist — enlivened the quiet halls full of wheelchairs and walkers there. As did his family.
Once, Page brought in leis and sunglasses, and grass skirts for the girls, so the four of them could lip-sync “Cheeseburger in Paradise” at the Sunrise talent show. “We brought the house down, didn’t we?” she says to Robert on a later visit.
It sparks something else. “Do you know what I remember?” he asks Page. “I remember the Sailboat Song. Did you come up with that, darlin’?”
It was the made-up song they sang to their daughters at night.
Sitting together in the assisted-living home, Page starts to sing it softly, and Robert joins in, tapping time on the table and staring off into the distance:
All I want is a sailboat day. And we’ll head toward the Chesapeake Bay. And we’ll laugh all the way. Oh, won’t it just be wonderful.
“After my injury, did the girls ever join in the chorus, hon?” Robert asks.
“I don’t know,” Page says. “But after you were in the hospital, I kept singing it, because it reminded them of you.”
* * *
As Hope and Nell got older, they seemed to miss the presence of a father more.
But they were smart, well-adjusted kids, and Page believed that although they didn’t have the benefit of Robert’s intellect, they picked up something just as valuable — a sense of compassion — from the father who made them beaded bracelets and gave them the candy bar he had won as a prize.
Page had made her peace with her life. She had lost her taste for politics — half the fun had been discussing it with Robert, she says — but she worked full time as a government-affairs consultant. On the side, she became an advocate for brain-injury and caregiver groups. She testified before the Virginia legislature — to lawmakers who had known Robert — seeking a Medicaid brain-injury waiver so there could be more resources and residential options for patients.
Many such patients end up in mental institutions, she learned, because there are so few alternatives. The Meltons were lucky. With her salary, Robert’s disability and Social Security payments, and, if necessary, help from her parents, they could afford assisted living.
The advocacy work helped her heal. “I had made up my mind: ‘This is what our life is going to be, and I’m okay with that,’ ” she says. “ ‘We’re okay, the children are doing well, Robert’s happy. We can survive this way.’ ”
She didn’t go out much socially, but in June 2008 she attended her 25th college reunion in Charlottesville. At a cocktail party, she reconnected with Allan D. Ivie IV, a U-Va. classmate she’d known since kindergarten, who was now a banker and father of four sons living in St. Louis.
They had been good friends as kids, co-editors of the high school newspaper, so it was easy to talk to Allan, tell him about the event that had defined her life for the past five years. Regretting that he’d been out of touch with Page, he vowed to contact her the next time he was in Richmond to visit his mother.
Six months later, he did. And soon after, with Allan in the midst of a divorce, they began talking regularly. It was nice to have an adult to talk to, Page says, and she began to wrestle with feelings that they could be more than friends. “It had never occurred to me at that point to be in a relationship,” she says. “It felt disloyal to Robert.”
Allan, too, was grappling with his feelings. He recalls that early on Page told him she was resigned to being alone with the girls for the rest of her life. “I said, ‘You can’t. Your heart is way too big for that.’ ”
He realized that the only way their relationship could develop was if it included Robert. As he started falling in love with Page, he said to her: “I see this responsibility that you have, and I want to help you with it. I understand this is a package deal.”
“That’s what triggered the relationship,” Page says. “He understood that Robert was central to our lives, that we needed to take care of him.”
Page eventually introduced Allan to Robert, and Allan worked to forge his own relationship with Robert, writing him an e-mail every day and taking him to breakfast at IHOP, Robert’s favorite, whenever he was in town. Allan felt uneasy at first, guilty about befriending a man with limited cognition while starting up a romance with his wife.
Page tiptoed into the subject of dating with Robert, telling him that she and Allan were beginning to be more than just friends, and asking if he understood and was comfortable with that. Robert told her it was fine. “He’s a really nice guy,” Page says he told her.
Allan started visiting every other weekend. He and Page would cook together and go for runs. They would take the girls hiking or on day trips. Allan put up a swing in the back yard and played soccer with the girls.
Page felt 30 again but was racked with guilt. “I believed my vows so strongly that they just kept ringing in my ears.”
She consulted her minister, who told her that by continuing to take care of Robert, she was still honoring those vows.
In March 2010, Allan and Page and the girls went skiing at the Homestead Resort in southwestern Virginia. Page watched from behind as Allan helped her daughters navigate the slopes, skiing with one girl on either side of him. “It hit me like a thunderbolt,” she says. “I’m watching him with these two girls, and I thought, here’s an unusual man, and a patient man, and a kind man, and a very loving man — and I felt my heart just lift.”
They started having whimsical talks about marriage, but merging families seemed too complicated. Allan, now divorced, couldn’t leave St. Louis, where he had joint custody of his three youngest sons, and was about to become president of Reliance Bank. And Page’s support system — her parents, her sister and brother — were all in Richmond.
And there was Robert. Marriage would require divorce. Page couldn’t imagine that. But another thought eased her mind: “I knew if something happened to me, Allan would take care of Robert, and the girls, of course.”
In June, Allan proposed. Page said yes, though she still couldn’t wrap her head around how it would work. Eventually, they came up with a plan. Page and the girls would move to St. Louis. And Robert would come with them.
“For all the good of Richmond and the support we’ve had, we’ve all been sort of defined by the injury,” Page said last spring. “So, we’ll go, and the girls will have the benefit of Robert’s relationship but also grow up in a house with Allan and all the things that you do as a family.”
The girls had grown to love Allan, Page says. But their first question was, “What about Daddy?” Page told them that their father would be as much a part of their lives as he had always been. They had questions about school and leaving their relatives and friends, but they also had the same sense she did that this could be good, says Page, “that life doesn’t have to be this grim and tough.”
Page discussed the plans with Robert’s brother Will, who had been a regular visitor through the years, and his father and stepmother.
“We had anguished a lot about the fact that Page was trapped — trapped by her love for Robert and overwhelming sense of loyalty to him,” said Eston Melton, who had been divorced from Robert’s mother when she died in 2002. “She had no life whatsoever, and those two girls did not have any kind of father image in their upbringing. So, we were very comfortable with the new relationship. More than comfortable; we encouraged it.”
Page talked to Zasler, the doctor, who thought Robert could deal with the new arrangement and counseled her to emphasize that she and the girls would still be there for him.
The only thing left was to tell Robert.
* * *
Page says she was a nervous wreck on the June 2010 morning when Will brought Robert to the house. She’d gone over the conversation dozens of times in her head but still couldn’t imagine saying the words out loud.
Finally, she started: “I’ll always love you, and we’ll always take care of you.”
“I know that,” Robert said.
She took a sip of coffee. “You know that Allan and I have been seeing each other, and we have a relationship and we love each other, and he’s asked me to marry him.”
Robert responded immediately: “You should marry him. He’s a good guy.” Then he asked what would happen to him.
Page explained that they would all move to St. Louis, where she’d already found a Sunrise facility close to their home. Their family would be the same, she told him, only bigger.
A week later was Father’s Day, and Nell drew a picture, titled “my family,” with all nine of them, including her four stepbrothers-to-be: “Allan, Dad, Mom, Hopie, Me, Harrison, Peter, Chris, Charlie.”
“If the youngest person in the family can grasp that this is what the picture looks like,” Page thought to herself, “then we’ll be okay.”
Page never used the word “divorce” with Robert, but that would have to be the next step. She hired a lawyer for herself and another one for Robert, and asked Will to represent Robert along with a guardian ad litem appointed by the court. The divorce was final in early 2011. Page wanted to remain Robert’s legal guardian, as she had been since his injury, and no one objected. Will signed for Robert.
On the morning of March 26 last year, Allan and his youngest son, Charles, took Robert to breakfast at IHOP. That evening, Page and Allan married in a small 19th-century chapel at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Richmond in front of about 100 people, including Robert’s father and stepmother, and his brother Will and his wife. But not Robert.
“I just could not have done that,” Page says. “It broke my heart to not be married to Robert anymore, in spite of all the good that was going to happen.”
As Allan held Page’s hands, he promised to always love her and her daughters. He turned to Hope and Nell, who were their mom’s attendants, and smiled. Then he looked back at Page: “And I promise to always help you provide compassionate care for Robert.”
The words seemed to unleash the emotions of the day. Will Melton, an assistant director with the Marine Corps, said he and his father — and everyone in the church including the minister — were moved to tears. “Allan’s vows were so touching,” Will said. “It was very uplifting in that regard — but also kinda sad.”
Page thinks Robert accepted the new expanded family. “On some level, it didn’t matter to him,” Page says.
At an appointment to switch the battery in his defibrillator before he left Richmond, Robert, with Page by his side, was asked if he was married or single. “Single. ... My lady’s married to someone else now,” he said.
Page looked at Robert. “Are you okay with that?”
“I’m fine with that,” he said, cheerful as ever, Page says.
Page says there have been a thousand moments like that, when she has felt almost apologetic and wanted to explain.
“In a way, I feel married to Robert forever,” she said a few days before leaving for St. Louis. “It’s not a traditional marriage. It’s not the marriage we signed up for. But I feel like there’s a connection there that never ends.”
In June of last year, Page and the girls moved into the five-bedroom ranch house she and Allan had bought in the St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur. They outfitted Robert’s room at Sunrise to look exactly like his room in Richmond: same layout, same photos, same bulletin board with “No. 1 Dad” sign.
Later that month, Page traveled back to Richmond to fly with Robert to his new home. The Richmond Sunrise staff showered him with tributes, a photo album and tearful good-byes.
With Will at the wheel, Robert hopped into the car as well-wishers followed him out the door. “Peace on earth,” he sighed happily, settling back in his seat. “Peace on earth.”
* * *
Nell runs to Allan when he gets home from work, gives him a hug, and tells him about the scary tornado movie she and Hope saw that day at the St. Louis Science Center’s IMAX theater.
The girls have had to give up “Cake Boss,” their favorite TV show, for “Deadliest Warrior” on the Spike channel, but they’re happy to make the concession to hang out with their new stepbrothers.
Page is still working as a consultant, out of an office at home. She has had to learn to cook for more people, and for boys. She laughed when Harrison, a track star who started last fall at the University of Arizona, ate all the pork tenderloin leftovers for breakfast.
Robert seems to be adapting best of all, Page and Allan both say. He takes part in everything from the walking club to the puzzle group at Sunrise. “I’ve got the calendar of today’s activities, and I have done the whole nine yards,” he tells Page one afternoon. “Aren’t you proud of me, darlin’?”
Page still sees him several times a week, taking him out or to the house, bringing him iced tea for his refrigerator or books of word searches.
Allan writes him e-mails every day and takes him to breakfast every Wednesday.
“All right, Robert, my man, you going for the omelet again?” Allan asks as they settle into a booth at their regular breakfast place one Wednesday in August.
Allan tells him about the St. Louis Arch; Robert asks if Allan’s son Peter is named after the singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary.
Toward the end of breakfast, Robert asks, “Mama’s doing well, Allan?”
“Yeah,” Allan says. “She’s doing okay.”
Allan acknowledges that there’s some awkwardness in their unorthodox family. He wonders how much Robert truly comprehends, since he still sometimes refers to Page as his wife.
Allan’s friends haven’t asked him directly, “Why are you doing this?” But he says they often look on with amazement at his embrace of Robert. It’s not an act of altruism, he says: “Truthfully, it came down to realizing that if I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Page . . . that was a pretty big incentive to do it.”
Page, now Page Melton Ivie, walks gingerly between her former and current husband, trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings. She says that, in a way, Robert has grasped the essence of their relationship better than any of them. He understands, she says, “that it’s not the legal arrangement, it’s the emotional arrangement, that emotional commitment.”
Robert’s father, who had worried that the blended family “could have easily tanked,” says he was heartened by how well it all seemed to be working when he and Will visited in September for Robert’s birthday. “It was almost like a miracle.”
Zasler says Robert’s case has been unusual in that he has continued to improve years after his injury — a consequence, the doctor thinks, of Robert’s strength, medications and rehabilitation, and Page’s devotion. “A lot of times, family members pack up the bag and run the other way,” he says. “Page’s support for Robert kind of exemplifies what true love is all about.”
For years after Robert’s injury, Page was sustained by the notion that she would see him again after she died, the man who turned her head in the press room and loved poetry and handed her their newborn babies. “We’d be able to talk through all this stuff, and I’d be able to say, ‘Well, I hope it worked out okay, that the decisions were the right ones, and that you were happy.’ ”
She’s comforted that Robert seems content. That’s what has made her own happiness possible.
Friends used to assume that the holidays were the hardest times for her. But it was really the motions of everyday life. Now that’s what brings her the greatest joy: making breakfast, setting the table — the long oak table from her dining room in Virginia that now sits in the sunny kitchen. There they all clasp hands to say grace before dinner. The table is big enough to accommodate all of them.
Susan Baer is a Washington writer. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com. Baer and Page Melton chatted live with readers on Monday, January 9. Read the transcript.
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