The Call Button And The Daughter Who Stayed

That does not excuse what she did. An exhausted woman who moves a dying woman’s lifeline out of her reach because the ringing wore on her nerves has still done something that cannot stand, no matter how sorry the reason behind it is. But Ruth from our church would tell you, and she would be right, that a villain with a reason is not the same thing as a villain with an excuse, and that the fair thing is to find out which one you are dealing with before you decide what justice ought to look like. I did not yet know which one Brandy was. I only knew what she had done, and that it had happened to my mother, and that somewhere down that hall it may well have happened to somebody else’s.

It had. By the end of the second day, Jean and I had quietly compared notes with two other families, a son named Phil Ketcham who visited his father in 108 every Sunday, and a niece named Carla who came up from Rushville twice a week for her aunt in 110. Phil’s father had a call cord that had been found tucked under his mattress more than once. Carla’s aunt had gone an entire afternoon without being changed because, she told Carla, she hadn’t been able to reach the button to ask.

Carla told me, standing in the hallway with her arms crossed tight against her chest, that she had almost called a lawyer the week before, just to ask what a case like her aunt’s might be worth, and had hung up before anyone answered because what she actually wanted was not a settlement, it was her aunt dry and dignified and not lying in anything past noon. That was the moment I knew we were all after the same thing, the four of us, and that it was not money.

None of us wanted a courtroom. I want to say that plainly, because it is the truest thing in this whole story. I did not want a lawyer, and neither did Jean, and neither did Phil or Carla. A lawsuit takes a year and takes a piece of your spirit and at the end of it your mother has still spent that year in the same building, cared for by the same tired, overworked hands, unless something underneath the whole arrangement actually changes. What we wanted was for somebody with the authority to fix a schedule and retrain a staff to walk those halls and see what we had seen.

Maple Creek, like every licensed nursing facility in Indiana, is required by federal law to recognize a Family Council if the families ask for one, and to have somebody from administration meet with it and respond to what it raises. I knew that because my mother’s social worker had mentioned it in passing months earlier, in the stack of paperwork you get when someone you love moves into one of these places and you are too heartbroken to read closely. I had filed it away and forgotten it until Jean, standing in the hallway on the third morning with her coffee going cold in her hand, said the words herself.