The Quilt the Administrator Threw Out
Our church basement has had the same low ceiling and green linoleum since 1966. Eleven of us sat around two folding tables with a percolator going and the radiator knocking. Russ had set out the chairs without being asked.
Donna wrote down the rosary and her parents’ framed wedding picture. Hal wrote his father’s Navy cap and a little brown radio Lester had listened to ballgames on since the ’69 Cubs fell apart. Melinda wrote an orange and brown afghan her grandmother Ione had crocheted. A retired school custodian wrote down a photograph of his brother in a baseball uniform, a boy who went to Vietnam and did not come home, folded the paper once, and passed it along without looking at anybody.
“It wasn’t clutter,” Melinda said at last. “Somebody with a clipboard decided that old people’s things were clutter.”
“A survey came through in September,” Hal said. “I heard the aides talking. Renee got written up for something about walls and floors. Fire safety, I think. She got scared.”
“That is not a reason to put a Navy cap in the trash,” Donna said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not.”
I took a folded paper out of my coat pocket. The Sunday before, I had stopped at the state poster by the dining room door, hung between the fire exit map and the chaplain’s schedule where nobody would read it. At the bottom was a name, a number, and the words Long-Term Care Ombudsman.
“I called her,” I said.
Her name was Nadine Overby, and she came to the church basement the next Tuesday night in a maroon Pontiac with 200,000 miles on it. She was about my age, in a red wool coat, with a canvas bag of folders and a tin of cookies she set down before she said hello.
I had expected a lawyer. Nadine looked like the woman who ran the church rummage sale, and I have never been so glad to be wrong.
She listened to all of us for two hours and wrote in a small notebook with a pencil. Then she closed it.
“First, what I’m not. I’m not the state inspector. I can’t fine a home or fire an administrator. I work for the residents. If a resident tells me to go in, I go in.”
“Then what can you do?” Hal asked.
“I can walk in. I can talk to people when nobody from the front office is in the room. I can ask a question out loud in front of a board. And I send what I see to the people who can fine somebody, and they listen because I don’t send much.”
She turned to me. “A resident has the right to keep her own belongings. A home can ask a family to take things home for a safety reason, and it has to tell the family and write down what it did. It cannot throw a person’s things away and call it housekeeping. And a resident has the right to the visitors she wants. A home can limit visits for a real safety reason, in writing. It cannot be a punishment for the daughter.”