In a soothing voice, Willite Keyes explains to her brother Julius that she is his sister and that she is taking him to California to be near her and another brother.
In a few minutes, Julius Johnson, 74, may ask her again.
“Who are you?”
And she explains again. “I’m you’re sister.”
Then he’ll ask if he has other family members, too, and she’ll describe their large family in Memphis and their brother on the West Coast.
Keyes, 64 and Johnson’s youngest sibling, does so happily. It’s been more than 15 years since she laid eyes on her brother, now suffering from dementia.
She and brother Melvin Collier arrived in Denver over the weekend to take their oldest sibling home with them. Reunited after nearly half a century by the efforts of his apartment manager, the family is happy to have Johnson back, even if he does not remember all that well.
“He was my big brother and I idolized him,” she said. “He was always talked about.”
Johnson left Memphis in the 1950s for Oakwood College but was soon drafted. After two years in the Army he settled in Denver nearly 47 years ago. The family relied on handwritten letters and rare phone calls to keep in touch over the years.
“He was always a private person,” said Keyes, who also cared for their mother with dementia before she died nearly 15 years ago. “All we knew was that he was in Denver.”
A year ago, she and Collier received letters from Johnson that said he planned to move west to be closer. Keyes enthusiastically responded with a letter of her own, but there was no response.
So when her phone rang nearly a month ago and it was the manager of Johnson’s HUD-subsidized apartment building – Olin Hotel Apartments on Logan Street – she was relieved.
Johnson put a skillet on the stove and forgot about it, smoking out his apartment. His too-big pants fell to his ankles in the hall because he forgot a belt. He was found in the middle of the street near City Park, but didn’t know where he lived.
Normally, without a family contact, social services is called to place those who become ill in other facilities, but the manager, Jan Wright, pestered Johnson for a relative’s number.
“So many people wouldn’t have done that and just gone to social services,” Keyes said. “I thank God for her.”
Johnson realizes he is losing his memory and jokes about it with a big, toothless smile.
“I can’t even remember when I came into this room,” he says. “We’ll talk as long as we can and remember as long as we can.”
His sister fills in the gaps for him now. They were born in Memphis, have two other brothers and grew up picking berries, cherries and other produce during summers in Michigan.
Johnson remembers some details, like the faces of his mother and grandmother, confronting an angry rattlesnake during the war, being stationed at Fort Carson and that he was born in 1931.
Johnson will leave Denver on Tuesday with Collier on a train because he does remember that he does not like flying.
“I’m just a forgetful old man,” he says smiling. “I was a wanderer.”
