Sean Kirst: In nursing home hit by Covid, Buffalo Bills are weekly magic

He'll continue that ritual Saturday, though he'll only be about five minutes away from Bills Stadium and the playoff showdown with the Baltimore Ravens. Sajecki will watch from a community room at Father Baker Manor in Orchard Park, which says everything about the forget-your-other-worries devotion generated by a home team trying to reach the American Football Conference championship game for the first time in 27 years.

Last spring, the manor had one of Western New York's earliest outbreaks of Covid-19. Sajecki lost many friends, even as he contracted the virus and survived. The experience reinforced his commitment to fellow residents – some contending with varying thresholds of dementia – who'll join him in watching the Bills against the Ravens.

That audience, he said, draws weekly magic from the team. The sheer electricity triggers shouts of joy, especially when Buffalo makes a big play.

“There’s a fervor they understand,” said Sajecki, 65, described by his daughter, Kate Pfeiffer, as an informal “morale officer” at the manor. She has powerful childhood memories of her dad and uncles gathering on Sundays to watch the Bills, allegiance she said carries more meaning than ever.

“He’s like everyone else,” said Pfeiffer, an occupational therapist at Father Baker. “It’s been a really long year, and the Bills – doing what they’re doing right now – just feel like what he needs, because everybody needs a reason to hope.”

Sajecki is retired from what his daughter calls “a little of everything” at the Erie County Department of Social Services. He arrived at the manor about a year ago, a few months after kidney failure triggered two major surgeries and the sepsis that nearly took his life. Like the team he loves, Pfeiffer said, her father's comeback was based on long, hard work.

At first, Sajecki was unable to walk. His memory and comprehension were temporarily diminished. He began a gradual and striking recovery – he now walks with a cane – but he could hardly anticipate being engulfed by the first American wave of a pandemic. 

“Just when things couldn’t get worse,” Pfeiffer said, “Covid happened.”

From March through June, according to Catholic Health officials, 29 people in the nursing home died from the virus. Sajecki, after testing positive, moved into a Covid-19 quarantine unit, where he remained until a negative test allowed him back to the main floor, months later. Yet he was asymptomatic, and the staff says Sajecki – intensely conscious of his relative good fortune – willingly embraced a larger role.

“It was almost like God put him here for a purpose,” said Jill Hirczak, director of life enhancement at the manor.

Sajecki saw the fear of other residents and the grief and weariness of staff layered in protective gear. There were too many mornings, he said, when he would leave his room to learn another friend had died or gone onto a ventilator in the night.

He's a dog lover, and he was often in the company of Chloe, a "Goldendoodle" brought in a few times a week by occupational therapist Michalina Ryan to provide comfort to residents. Sajecki did his best to create smiles, telling his fabled corny jokes in a place where relatives could come no closer than a window, a place where he saw elderly women and men “crying and crying because they missed their families so much.”

In that way, Sajecki said he was fortunate. His daughters – Pfeiffer and Rosalind Sajecki, a nurse – both work at the manor. He could not touch them, but he often saw them through a window as he leaned on his walker, with about as much freedom as possible in quarantine.

“I didn’t have to worry about catching anything,” said Sajecki, who understood the difference he could make. Beginning in childhood, he had an affinity for older relatives and neighbors. He appreciated tales of Buffalo as it was, years ago, and he did his best in the Covid unit to simply offer company to frightened, lonely residents.

For weeks, he ate lunch with a woman who loved the World War II-era music of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. Sajecki listened. He told her about his parents – his dad was a welder at Ernst Steel, while his mother worked for decades at the downtown library – and how they routinely enjoyed big-band albums on the record player.

The woman had the virus. For a long time, she seemed fine.

One day he went to lunch, and her seat was empty.

“That’s what's insidious about this disease,” he said. “You can be better, you can seem to be on the upswing, and then just like that you’re gone.”

Nationally, of roughly 400,000 people lost to the virus, almost 40% were residents of nursing homes. Sajecki worries that figure's so vast it turns lives of monumental meaning into numb statistics. He's lived with those at highest risk and heard their stories, and he said they're the women and men who built Buffalo.

“I’m not sure why,” he said, “but they seem to trust me, and I thought maybe I could reach them in a different way, on a different plane.”

While Sajecki understands the Bills have other things on their minds, he hopes they know they have the same impact, in a profound way.

He's followed the team since he was in kindergarten, establishing vivid memories of such 1960s mainstays as quarterback Jack Kemp or running back Cookie Gilchrist. Sajecki, for instance, vividly recalls such unforgettable matchups as Gilchrist's open field duels with legendary linebacker Nick Buoniconti, then with the Patriots.

Years later, when Sajecki worked for the county, he arrived a little early one day for a conference near Fountain Plaza. He had some time to kill, so he wandered into the now-closed Hyatt Regency lobby and settled in a chair so soft he quickly fell asleep, until he felt someone tapping his knee.

He woke up to the face of Jack Kemp, by then a congressman and long past football, checking to see if this guy out like a light was OK. Kemp was at the Hyatt for an event in the company of Hall of Fame tight end John Mackey, which to Sajecki was as surreal as a dream. Kemp, he said, “probably thought I was crazy because I kept wanting to shake his hand again and again.”

Inspired by the memory, Sajecki launched into an animated assessment of Josh Allen and this year’s team, which he calls “a bright spot in a dismal time.” While administrators say Father Baker Manor hasn't had a positive Covid-19 test in months, Sajecki reflected with grief on the national death toll from the virus, and with dismay on last week's riot that overwhelmed the U.S. Capitol.

At a time of bitter division, he said the Bills assume a barrier-shattering civic importance made clear by the jubilant crowd that greeted the players at Buffalo’s airport, in the middle of the night, after the team clinched the AFC East Division title. Asked what it would mean to the community if the team managed to win the Super Bowl, Sajecki whispered a profane two-word expression, the only time he cursed in our many conversations.

“They’re the one good thing everyone can get behind,” he said.

Last Saturday, just before the Bills beat the Indianapolis Colts for their first playoff win in a quarter-century, Sajecki received the vaccine for the virus. That gave the day a doubly memorable and joyous meaning, and while it's only a step toward the point when he's someday healthy enough to leave, he already plans to return to the manor as a volunteer.

The way he sees it, there's no better place to watch the Bills.