The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed

I did not scream at anybody that first night. I want that on the record because what came after is going to sound, in places, like I was a quiet woman, and I was, and quiet is not the same thing as doing nothing. I walked out to the nurses’ station and I asked for whoever was in charge of the floor that evening. A nurse named Deb came around the desk, tired looking, kind enough, and I told her what I had found and asked her to please have somebody reposition my mother’s call button properly and keep it there.

“I’ll make a note,” Deb said. “We’re down two aides tonight, Mrs. Spahr. I’m sorry. I’ll get it looked at.”

I believed her. That is the part Sharon down at the courthouse would ask me about if she heard this story, because Sharon asks that about everything: why didn’t you just make the sensible phone call and end it right there. I made the sensible phone call. I made the sensible request to the sensible person at the sensible desk, and I went home that night and told my husband Roy about it over a cold supper, and I came back the next morning expecting it to be fixed.

It was not fixed. The cord was looped over the same curtain rail, in the same spot, like nobody had touched it at all.

That was the morning I stopped believing a note on a clipboard was going to be the thing that protected my mother, and I pulled the vinyl recliner out of the corner of her room, set it up against the side of her bed, and told her I was not leaving.

My mother is not of my generation. She was raised to think that a daughter sitting in a nursing home room for days running was a daughter making trouble, and trouble was the one thing a Spahr woman was not supposed to make. “You’ve got a job,” she said. “You’ve got Roy. You can’t sit here.”

“I called in,” I told her, which was true. I ran the front office at Teller Feed and Seed for nineteen years and I had never once used more than two sick days in a row, and when I told my boss Dale that my mother’s call button had been moved out of her reach and I needed to be with her, he did not ask me a single follow up question. “Take what you need,” he said, and I have thought about that kindness more than once since.

Roy drove over a duffel bag that afternoon with my toothbrush and a change of clothes and a thermos of coffee, and he stood in the doorway of that room looking at the two of us, his jaw working the way it does when he is deciding whether a thing calls for his hands or his patience.