The Tuesday Volunteer Who Did Puzzles With Dad

How we got there

I want to be honest about my part in this, because it would be easy to tell it as if my brother just woke up one morning and decided to bury his sister. He didn’t. I helped dig.

Our mother, June, died two Februarys ago. It was her heart, and it was quick. Dad had been forgetting things before that, but Mom had been covering for him. After she was gone, nobody was covering. We found the checkbook in the freezer.

Dad farmed dairy his whole life, sixty cows on a hundred and sixty acres outside of Brodhead. He sold the herd at seventy and rented the land out, but he still got up at four thirty every morning of his life and went out to a barn that had nothing in it.

I’m a rural mail carrier out of the Brodhead post office. My route is a hundred and twelve miles, mostly gravel, in a right-hand-drive Jeep. I’m usually done by two. For fourteen months after Mom died, I drove out to the farm every afternoon.

I made his supper. I laid out his pills in the plastic box with the days on it. I slept over three or four nights a week, on the couch. I’ve been divorced since Megan was in grade school, and Megan was off at UW-Whitewater by then.

Steve did the money. He’s a welder with his own shop on the edge of town, and Dad named him power of attorney back in 2015, when Steve was the one good with paperwork. Nobody thought anything of it then.

Then, last January, Dad walked out of the house at three in the morning in his slippers and his barn coat. It was eleven below. A milk hauler found him on Highway 11, a mile and a half from the house, walking toward the old co-op that closed in 1994.

Steve said it was time for memory care. I said it was not.

We had that fight at Mom’s kitchen table, with Dad asleep in his recliner in the next room. Steve had brochures and a spreadsheet: seventy-eight hundred dollars a month for Maple Court, and how long the money from selling the house would last. I said the worst thing I have ever said to anybody.

I said, “You just want the farm sold so you don’t have to drive out here anymore.”

He didn’t say anything. He just folded up the spreadsheet and put it in his coat. Steve had been paying Dad’s property taxes out of his own pocket for two years because Dad’s checkbook was a mess, and I knew it, and I said it anyway.

They moved Dad into Maple Court on the first of March. I didn’t go. I told myself it was because I couldn’t stand to see him in that place. The truth is I was too proud and too angry to walk into a building I had said he did not belong in.

I stayed away all spring and into the summer. I sent cards. I told myself I would go when I was ready. And all that time my father was standing at a window asking for me, and my brother was the one standing next to him.

By June, Steve had already done it. I did not find out until I finally went, at the end of August.

Why I didn’t fight him the regular way

My daughter, Megan, said what everybody would say. She was home for the last week before fall semester, sitting on my porch steps with her feet bare.

“Mom, get a lawyer. He can’t just declare you dead.”

“He didn’t declare me anything. He told a man with Alzheimer’s a story.”

“And put you on a list.”

“He’s the power of attorney. They follow what he says.”

I did call a lawyer in Monroe, the woman who had done my divorce. She said I could petition the court and ask a judge to order visits. It would cost thousands of dollars, and with the court calendar the way it was, it could take a year.

“Your father is eighty-one,” she said gently. “How is he doing?”

I knew how he was doing. A year from now he might not know anybody’s name. And a court fight would drag Steve and me into a room to say the worst things about each other, under oath, while Dad sat in Maple Court not knowing why his son came in angry.

I didn’t want to win against my brother. I wanted to sit with my father.

So I sat on the porch with Megan and the mosquitoes and thought about it until it was dark. And somewhere in there I remembered the bulletin board in the Maple Court lobby. Next to the menu for the week and the hairdresser’s hours, there had been a sheet of yellow paper.

Volunteers Wanted. Reading, music, crafts, puzzles. Training provided. Ask for Beth.