The Healing Journey

May 7, 2026

Brian Wallace wrote the poem “No Visitors” about his grandmother Madeleine, known as Mal to her grandchildren. “She was a truly great person, an Irish floor lady in a Bridgeport corset factory,” Wallace recalled. “Strong, shrewd, humorous — she could nail a phrase or an expression with the talent of an artist. She had a gift for summing up. She lived to be 90.” Madeleine is pictured second from right in second row with family members at Sunnyside Cottage on Pine Creek Beach in Fairfield in the early 1900s.

No Visitors

By Brian Wallace

Sometimes I walk into the lobby
And she’s there on the gurney
And it happens the same way

“I love you Mal,” I say
As the attendant makes the turn
Toward another hallway

“I love you too,” she mugs
Sounding almost comically garbled
Between the pain and the drugs

I remember the bright blue-white
florescent lights
and polished floor tiles

The gurney was brushed stainless steel
With large black turning wheels
The lobby was filled with other people

I’d never seen her out of her element
She should have been on her back porch
Feeding city strays off a white dish

Or keeping an eye on the street
From the stuffed chair in her living room
A Box of Russell Stover’s to sweeten the conversation

I was working in the building
And just happened to be up on the floor
A hospital can turn anyone into a stranger

I knew her from another life
I was her grandson
She was my grandmother

The world we lived in
Moved from the summer beach
To her year-round house on Iranistan Ave.

Cottages patched from driftwood
Washed in from Long Island Sound
And a respectable two-family in a factory town

That world held true to those two poles
Until the attendant wheeled her out
On a day I didn’t expect

But why didn’t I follow her
Walk alongside the stretcher to the room
Look into her eyes and hold her hand

I found a report card she saved from third grade
“A” in Math and everything but conduct
She knew how to keep her accounts

And she didn’t want visitors
So I kept on walking as I’ve done since
both of us understanding what it meant

It was the last time I saw her
A week later we carried her up
The steep granite steps of St Augustine’s

All of us comically staggering under the weight
Of her lead-lined mahogany coffin
Like launching a ship

…She would have appreciated that
It was the one of the few times together
We didn’t share a laugh.

(Brian Wallace was editor of Fairfield County Catholic and Director of Communications for the Diocese of Bridgeport for many years.)

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