The Hayride Grandma Asked For

Why I didn’t fight her

I want to be fair about my aunt, because she’s going to be the villain in this for a while and she deserves a fair hearing first.

Gail Riggs is sixty-six. She’s my dad’s younger sister. She never married, and she spent thirty-one years as a payroll clerk at the hospital in the county seat, and she is the most organized person I have ever known. She has a binder for everything.

When my dad passed four years ago, Gail became the one with Grandma’s papers. The power of attorney for health care, the financial power of attorney, all of it.

Dad had held them, and then he was gone, and Grandma signed them over to Gail at the kitchen table with a lawyer from town.

Two years ago, Grandma fell in her own kitchen reaching for a cake pan on the top shelf. She broke her hip.

Gail was the one who found her, because Gail checked on her every morning at eight o’clock sharp, and Gail was the one who rode in the ambulance and sat in that emergency room for nine hours.

Then came the surgery, and the rehab, and the fight about selling the house. Gail won that fight because she was right, and Grandma moved into the nursing home that spring.

Gail visits every single day. I visit twice a week. I know which of those numbers is bigger.

So I knew where her fear came from. I knew it the second she said “emergency room.”

But I also knew what I had seen at that table, and it wasn’t my grandmother being protected.

It was my grandmother being told she was finished, in front of strangers, by her own daughter.

Gail had the papers. I didn’t. If I picked a fight with her in that sunroom, or on the phone that night, she would dig in, and she had every right to dig in, and Grandma would sit in the middle of it.

I had watched enough family fights in that building to know how they end.

So I didn’t fight her. I decided to do it right instead, by the book, so nobody could say I had snuck anything past anyone.

The director’s office

On Monday I took my lunch at eleven, ate a cheese sandwich in the car, and drove out to the home.

I asked at the desk for Dorcas, the activity director, who is about my age and has run the bingo and the crafts and the church services there for fifteen years.

Dorcas listened to the whole thing without interrupting once. When I said “Belgian team,” her eyebrows went up. When I said “fourteen residents, maybe,” she put down her pen.

“We used to do a hayride,” she said. “Years ago. Before my time. There’s a picture in the hall by the chapel. A man with mules, I think.”

She looked at me. “We’d have to take it to Pleas.”

Pleas is the administrator. He’s a big, slow-talking man near retirement, a Navy veteran who keeps a coffee can of peppermints on his desk.

He listened too. Then he took out a legal pad and started writing down rules, which is exactly what I wanted.

Every resident who went would need their own signed consent, or their family’s if they couldn’t sign.

Every one would need an okay from their own doctor, faxed over. Our physical therapist would check each one on the steps before they could ride.

There had to be one staff member for every three or four residents, plus a nurse.

The home’s van would follow behind the whole way with a wheelchair and the nurse’s bag, in case anybody needed to come back early.

And Bud would have to show his liability coverage, which he already carried for the parades.

“The route,” Pleas said. “Where are you taking them?”

I told him about the gravel road that runs off the back of the home’s lot, past the old cemetery, into Reva’s woods.

Reva has owned that forty acres for fifty years and lets the Boy Scouts camp there.

It loops around and comes out on the county road and back up the lane. About three miles, all of it flat.

Pleas wrote it down. Then he tapped the pad with his pen and said, “Your aunt is your grandmother’s health care power of attorney.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That only kicks in when a resident can’t make her own decisions.” He looked at me over his glasses.

“Elnora can make her own decisions. She beat me at checkers on Thursday. So Elnora signs for Elnora.”