The Ramp My Brother Built for Dad

“Money’s tight right now, Stace,” my brother said, and I could hear a boat motor somewhere behind his voice. “Dad doesn’t need new shirts. They do his laundry up there. He’s fine.”

I was standing in the hallway of the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown, holding one of Dad’s two flannel shirts.

The elbow had worn so thin I could see my fingers through the plaid.

“It’s sixty dollars, Terry,” I said. “Two shirts from the farm store. He’s had these since before he moved in. The plaid is washed nearly white.”

“Then you buy them,” he said. “You’re the one who’s always up there. I’ve got my hands full with all the paperwork.” Then he said he had to go, and the line went quiet.

I would have bought them myself that afternoon. Dad wouldn’t let me.

When I brought it up, he shook his head slowly, the way he does everything now, and tapped the arm of his wheelchair.

“Terry handles my money,” he said. “You keep yours for your boy. He’s got books to buy.” His voice is soft since the Parkinson’s got worse. You learn to lean in.

So he kept wearing the two shirts. I kept washing them by hand in the sink of his room on Sundays, because the laundry was hard on them. And I kept my mouth shut until Christmas.

My name is Stacy Rader. I’m forty-five, and I’ve been a respiratory therapist at the hospital in Fort Dodge for nineteen years.

I work nights, three twelves a week, and I drive to Marshalltown on my days off.

My father is Earl Rader. He is seventy-seven years old.

He was drafted out of Hardin County in 1967 and served in the Army in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. He doesn’t talk about it much.

He came home, married my mother, and worked thirty-one years at the furnace plant in Marshalltown.

He coached Little League. He sang bass in the Methodist choir, standing in the back row because he was tall.

Mom died in 2019. Two years later, Dad’s right hand started to shake while he was holding his coffee cup, and a neurologist in Des Moines told him it was Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s is on the VA’s list of illnesses presumed to come from Agent Orange.

Dad was in country, so he didn’t have to prove anything. The VA rated him 100 percent service-connected within the year.

He fell twice that winter, once on the back steps and once in the bathroom.

After the second fall, he decided on his own to move into the Iowa Veterans Home. He said he would rather go while he could still choose.

Here is the part people don’t know. When a veteran is rated 70 percent or more, the VA pays the state veterans home directly for his care. Dad’s room, meals, nursing and therapy cost him nothing.

That meant his monthly compensation, close to four thousand dollars, was his own.

It was for his shirts, his haircuts, his peppermints, his hearing aid batteries and anything else he wanted. It was his.

In 2023, after his doctor noted he was forgetting to open his mail, the VA rated him unable to manage his own funds.

When that happens, the VA appoints a fiduciary to handle the money for the veteran.

Terry volunteered. He lived in Ames, forty minutes from Marshalltown, and I lived ninety minutes away and worked nights.

A VA field examiner interviewed him, and they appointed him in the fall of 2023.