Every Tuesday, She Shows Up
Nobody asked Margaret Hollis to do it. There was no nonprofit backing her, no grant funding, no viral social media campaign that launched her into action. There was just a Tuesday in October 2017 when she walked into Pinecrest Care Center in rural Clarkesville, Georgia, carrying a cardboard box of homemade oatmeal cookies and a notepad, and sat down next to a 94-year-old Korean War veteran named Earl who hadn’t had a visitor in eleven months.
That Tuesday changed both of their lives. And eventually, it changed an entire county.
Margaret, now 71, spent 34 years as a high school English teacher. She never served in the military. Her late husband, David, didn’t either. Her children hadn’t. By most conventional measures, she had no particular reason to make veterans her mission. But when she retired in the spring of 2017, she found herself restless in a way she hadn’t anticipated.
“I thought I wanted quiet,” she says, laughing softly. “I had earned the quiet. But after about four months, I realized the quiet was just loneliness wearing a prettier name.”
The Moment That Started Everything
The seed, Margaret says, was planted at a Memorial Day parade she attended that spring. Near the end of the procession, a small group of elderly veterans rolled past in wheelchairs, waving to the crowd. The applause was polite. Respectful. But brief.
“Everyone clapped and then went back to their hot dogs,” she recalls. “And I watched these men and women, some of them in their 90s, and I thought: when was the last time someone really sat with them? Not for a holiday. Just because they mattered?”
She went home and made a list. Through public records, local VA contacts, and a few phone calls to nursing home administrators, she identified every long-term care facility in Habersham County that housed veterans. There were six. She estimated roughly 80 veterans spread across them. She mapped out a visiting schedule and started the following Tuesday.
What She Carries in That Box
Margaret’s Tuesday ritual has become something of a local legend. She arrives at each facility with what she calls her “kit”: homemade baked goods, a fresh notepad, a small recording device (with permission), a few blank greeting cards, and sometimes, a printed photograph of a veteran’s hometown or military branch that she’s researched ahead of time.
The notepad matters most. Margaret doesn’t come to talk. She comes to listen.
“A lot of people visit nursing homes and they mean well, but they fill the silence,” she explains. “They talk about the weather or their grandkids. These veterans, many of them have carried stories for 60 or 70 years that no one has ever asked to hear. I just ask. And then I stop talking.”
Over six years, she has recorded more than 340 hours of veteran stories. She has helped three families locate military records they didn’t know existed. She has attended eleven funerals of veterans she visited regularly. She brought flowers to each one.
The Veterans Who Remember Her
Ask around any of the six facilities and the responses are immediate and consistent.
Raymond, 88, a Vietnam veteran at Blue Ridge Memory Care, lights up when Margaret’s name is mentioned. “She remembered that I liked chess,” he says. “She came in one Tuesday and just put a chessboard on the table without saying a word. We played for two hours. I beat her every time.” He grins. “She let me, I think.”
Dorothy, 82, a retired Army nurse, says Margaret was the first person who ever asked her specifically about her service as a woman in the military. “People always asked the men about the war,” Dorothy says. “Margaret asked me about my patients. About what it felt like to be in that ward. I cried. She cried. And then we had cookies.”
The Lessons That Emerged, One Visit at a Time
Margaret doesn’t frame what she does as heroic. She’s quick, almost insistent, to redirect any praise. But after six years of weekly visits, she has gathered a quiet wisdom that she’s started sharing with local church groups and a community college class on aging and civic engagement. Here is some of what she has learned:
- Presence is the rarest gift. Most isolated elderly people don’t need entertainment or activities. They need someone to sit with them without distraction, without a phone in hand, without an agenda.
- Stories need witnesses. Many veterans, particularly those from older generations, were taught not to speak about their experiences. Being asked with genuine curiosity, and being listened to without judgment, can unlock decades of held silence.
- Consistency builds trust. Margaret stresses that showing up once is kind. Showing up every week for six years is transformative. “They know I’m coming,” she says. “That knowing matters enormously.”
- Small things carry enormous weight. A printed photograph of the ship someone served on. Remembering that someone takes their coffee black. Bringing the specific kind of cookie an 89-year-old mentioned preferring three months ago. These details tell people they are seen.
- We have more time than we think. Margaret’s weekly visits take roughly six hours of her Tuesday. “People say they don’t have time,” she says. “I think sometimes we mean we haven’t decided it’s a priority yet. That’s okay to admit. But it’s worth asking yourself why.”
What It Has Given Her
In interviews and in the community college talks she gives, Margaret is candid about the personal dimension of her work. This was never purely altruistic, she says. It saved her, too.
“After David died in 2019, I had the visits,” she says simply. “I had Earl, who passed in 2020, but who told me the week before he died that he wasn’t scared anymore because he had finally told his stories to someone who wrote them down. I had Raymond’s chess games. I had Dorothy’s laugh, which is the loudest laugh I have ever heard from a human being.”
She pauses. “They gave me a reason to get dressed on Tuesdays. And then the Tuesdays saved the rest of the week.”
How It Has Spread
Word of Margaret’s visits spread organically through local community networks. By 2021, she had recruited seven other retired women from her church and neighborhood to join a loosely organized group they call Tuesday Company, a name lifted from a poem one of the veterans recited to them.
Tuesday Company now coordinates visits across all six facilities every week. They have no official nonprofit status, no website, no social media presence. They operate on a Google spreadsheet and a group text chain. Their entire budget consists of whatever each member spends on baked goods and supplies, typically between ten and twenty dollars per person per week.
The local VA has taken notice. Margaret was invited to speak at a regional conference on veteran wellness in 2023, where she told a room of administrators and policy professionals something that reportedly stopped the room cold:
“You can build all the programs you want. But programs don’t hold someone’s hand. People do.”
An Invitation, Not a Challenge
Margaret is careful not to moralize. She doesn’t end her community talks with a rallying cry or a call to action. She ends them with a question, always the same one:
“Is there someone in your town, right now, who has earned the right to be remembered, and is waiting for someone to show up?”
She lets the silence sit. She’s good at that.
If you are moved to find veterans in long-term care facilities in your area, the National Association of Long Term Care Ombudsman Programs (NORC) and your local VA office can help identify facilities and connect you with volunteer coordination contacts. No experience is required. No military background is necessary. A notepad and a Tuesday afternoon are a very good place to start.