51 years after answering call, Norfolk nun calls it a day

NORFOLK

Sister Mary June Morin was in her 20s when she came to St. Mary's Infant Home, dispatched by her order to mend clothing and do laundry for the babies and toddlers.

"Lord Mercy, what is this?" she thought upon entering the decrepit building on Chapel Street in downtown Norfolk in 1960.

That was five decades, two buildings and thousands of children ago.

You might say she took to her young wards, and they to her - so much so that, 51 years to the day after she began, 77-year-old Sister Morin retired Tuesday from what's now called St. Mary's Home for Disabled Children.

It marks the end of an era. She is the last of the Daughters of Wisdom sisters working here, a tradition that dates to the mid-1940s. She is also the longest-serving employee at St. Mary's - no longer Catholic-run, but a private nonprofit center.

"To me, it's like a home, too, so it's hard," she said about her departure. "But I'll be 78 in March, so I think it's time."

She's seen a lot of change over the years:

The nuns' floor-length habits with veils yielded to regular clothing. A home for abandoned and neglected babies, run by sisters who lived on the premises, is now a residential treatment center bustling with physical therapists and special-ed professionals.

Eighty disabled children, up to the age of 22, live at the center on Kempsville Circle.

"She loves them to death," said Shirley Parham, who's worked at the home for 25 years herself. "Some of them that recognize her voice will wonder where she is."

It's a voice with a distinctive French accent. Morin grew up one of 12 children in a French Canadian American family in northern Maine. She entered the Daughters of Wisdom order directly from high school, and worked in the kitchen of a Brooklyn clinic for seven years before being tapped by her order to go to St. Mary's with a group of other nuns.

She's held many posts here over the years. She remembers bathing babies in the sink. Getting up in the middle of the night to take a sick child to the hospital. Escorting a group of children to the beach for a field trip.

As the home evolved into a residential treatment center for severely disabled children, her role shifted. She took classes in Montessori teaching and psychology. Although there were medical experts to tend to the mostly nonverbal children, tasks that required quiet persistence fell to her.

For instance, a child arrived one day, named Tommy, who was a "failure to thrive" baby. Sister Morin was asked to coax him into eating. She would sit him on her lap, play some music, and talk with him as he drank from his bottle.

"He was skin and bones," she recalled.

Gradually, though, he gained weight, and the visually impaired boy came to recognize the sound of her footsteps. If he cried or lashed out, an aide or teacher would call for Sister Morin. She'd come put him on her lap and say, "OK, Tom-Tom, what's the problem?"

Once she took off his shoes and found that his toes were curled up inside. She took off the splints on his legs, and held him five or 10 minutes while he calmed down.

"OK, now we are going back to school again," she told him.

Before she would go on vacation, they'd record her voice so they could play it when he cried.

Tommy is 19 now. Last Thursday, as he sat in a wheelchair, she put her hands on his shoulders, and rubbed his face. He moved his head back and forth in recognition.

After years of watching residents leave when they turn 22, it is Sister Morin's turn to walk out the door. She gets a little teary-eyed thinking about it.

"Now you have to take care of me," she said to Tommy.

Sister Morin arrived a young woman, and leaves with close-cropped gray hair, pushing a walker around the polished hallways of St. Mary's, which moved from Chapel Street to a new building near Sentara Leigh Memorial Hospital in 2005.

On her last day, she arrived as usual at 4:30 a.m.; the shift helped her avoid tunnel traffic from her home in Portsmouth.

"It doesn't feel like 51 years," she said Tuesday. "When you enjoy what you do, you don't think about time or your age."

She worked on notebooks that trace St. Mary's history, and spent time with some of the children she grew close to over the years.

"You learn things through the children. You have to know the children's likes and dislikes."

A girl named Lauren, for instance, loved music, but didn't want to learn to use her wheelchair. Sister Morin put a CD in a boom box and told her if she wanted to listen to it, she needed to wheel over and turn it on.

That motivated Lauren, now 20, into action.

The lessons have gone both ways.

"I have learned patience from them. I have learned not to complain when I am sick and hurt, because they never complain."

Morin will continue to live in Portsmouth, and her retirement plans include helping the homeless, fund raising for Haiti and other social justice efforts.

High on her list, as well, is volunteer work at St. Mary's.

"I'm not saying good bye forever," she said. "When you rest, you rust, and I don't want to do that."

Elizabeth Simpson, (757) 446-2635, elizabeth.simpson@pilotonline.com