My grandmother, Eleanor, raised half this family one way or another. She raised me plenty when my folks were pulling doubles at the plant. She made the best cornbread you ever put in your mouth, and that woman loved a hot bath more than anybody I ever knew.<\/p>\n
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She\u2019d soak in there till her fingers went all pruney and come out humming some old church song. Mind you, this was before the Alzheimer\u2019s started taking her piece by piece, before she quit knowing my name.<\/p>\n
By last year Grandma couldn\u2019t be left\u00a0alone<\/span>\u00a0at all. Couldn\u2019t walk far, couldn\u2019t remember if she\u2019d eaten lunch ten minutes after she ate it. Somebody had to step up and live with her, and that somebody turned out to be Diane. She moved into Grandma\u2019s little house and she just did it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
The rest of us would call once a week, ask how things were going, feel real good about ourselves, and hang up. I\u2019ll be honest with you, that was about the size of my own contribution too.<\/p>\n
Then the family started having these meetings. About money. About\u00a0\u201cthe estate,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0like we were the Rockefellers. My mother, Sharon, she\u2019s always been the practical one, she pulled up Grandma\u2019s bank statements at the kitchen table and her mouth went into a thin little line.\u00a0\u201cThe account\u2019s draining,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0she said. My uncle Ray nodded along like a man at church. And they started using this word over and over. Preserve. Preserve what\u2019s left. Like Grandma was already a thing in the past tense.<\/p>\nI remember Diane calling me one night, real quiet, real wore out. She said the hospice care was getting expensive and she wanted to know if anybody could chip in to help carry it. So Sharon and Ray had themselves a whole sit-down about it. And they voted no. Not one more dime.\u00a0\u201cShe doesn\u2019t even know where she is,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Ray said, leaning back in his chair.\u00a0\u201cWhy pour good money into it.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Preserve the\u00a0inheritance<\/span>. For us, he meant. For them. And me, I sat right there and I didn\u2019t say a\u00a0blessed<\/span>\u00a0thing.<\/p>\n\n
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Diane only said one thing back to all of us. I can still hear it plain as day.\u00a0\u201cShe\u2019s not dead yet.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0That was the whole speech. We all kind of studied our shoes. And I figured, well, that\u2019s just Diane being dramatic, she always was the soft one of the bunch.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
So when the money kept right on disappearing after that, all sixty-seven thousand of it in four short months, it wasn\u2019t hard to talk myself into thinking the worst about her.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll tell you the part I\u2019m most ashamed of. I went over there one afternoon, before any of this blew up, and I saw what Diane had done to the place. A hospital bed set up in the front room. Pill bottles lined up on the counter, all labeled in her handwriting.<\/p>\n
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A big walk-in tub put in where the old one\u00a0used<\/span>\u00a0to be. And you know what I thought, standing in that doorway? I thought,\u00a0\u201cLook at all the money she\u2019s spending.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Not\u00a0\u201clook at how she\u2019s loving her.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0I looked at my grandmother\u2019s care and saw a price tag. Go figure.<\/p>\nThe story went around the family fast after that. Diane\u2019s living in Mom\u2019s house and Mom\u2019s money\u2019s vanishing, so you do the math. Sharon was the one who pushed hardest for charges, and Ray backed her up.<\/p>\n
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And me? I\u2019d love to tell you I stood up for my aunt. I didn\u2019t. I told myself the truth would sort itself out, that if she was innocent she could just prove it, and that little story let me off the hook for going along with it. So we filed. Against Diane. Our own blood.<\/p>\n
The hearing was on a Thursday. Or maybe a Friday. Doesn\u2019t matter now. Small room, hard wooden benches, the kind that make your back ache. The three of us sat up front behind the table, Sharon and Ray and me, sitting there like we were the ones somebody had\u00a0wronged<\/span>. And Diane came in all\u00a0alone<\/span>. No lawyer. No nothing. Just her in that blue cardigan I\u2019d seen her wear to church a hundred times, holding an old shoebox against her chest.<\/p>\nThey asked her straight out.\u00a0\u201cDid you withdraw sixty-seven thousand dollars from Eleanor Price\u2019s account?\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Diane stood up nice and slow and she said,\u00a0\u201cYes.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Plain as that. My stomach did something I can\u2019t describe.\u00a0\u201cDo you understand the charges against you?\u201d<\/span>\u00a0the man asked her.\u00a0\u201cYes,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0she said.\u00a0\u201cBut I\u2019d like to submit some receipts.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0And she set that shoebox down on the table and lifted the lid.<\/p>\n\n
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A hundred and forty-seven of them. She\u2019d kept every last one. She started laying them out in rows, one after another after another, reading them off in this flat, tired little voice. Hospice co-pay, three hundred and forty dollars.<\/p>\n
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Then another just like it. Wheelchair rental, two hundred eighty-nine dollars a month. Her medications, eleven hundred dollars every single month, like clockwork. The table started filling up with little squares of paper.<\/p>\n
She kept right on goingShe kept right on going. The walk-in tub, sixty-seven hundred dollars, the one Grandma could actually still use, the one thing that still made her happy. The hospital bed, forty-two hundred. Every cent of that sixty-seven thousand, spent on the woman who raised every one of us.<\/p>\n
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And every cent had a little piece of paper to go with it.<\/p>\n
The room got real quiet. Diane didn\u2019t cry. She just stood there next to all those receipts and waited. The judge looked them over for a long minute. Then he looked at us, the three of us sitting up front so sure of ourselves, and he said,\u00a0\u201cCharges dismissed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nI thought that was the end of it. It wasn\u2019t. He set the papers down and turned to face our bench, and his voice changed.\u00a0\u201cBased on these receipts and the evidence of deliberate refusal of care,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0he said,\u00a0\u201cthis court is referring this matter to Adult Protective Services.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Then he said the part that took the air right out of me.\u00a0\u201cThe individuals now under investigation for elder neglect are seated in this room.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n
He was looking at us. At Sharon. At Ray. At me. We came in there pointing a finger at the one person who did right, and we walked out with our own names on a list. Diane just gathered up her receipts, one by one, slow, and put them back in that shoebox like they were something precious. She didn\u2019t look at us. Not once.<\/p>\n
I never apologized. That\u2019s the truth of it. I keep telling myself I\u2019ll call her, and then I think about what I said in my head that day standing in Grandma\u2019s doorway, looking at a hospital bed and seeing a bill, and I put the phone back down. Grandma passed two months later. Diane sat with her the whole time. The rest of us, the ones who wanted to preserve her, we weren\u2019t anywhere near that room.<\/p>\n
At the funeral I saw Diane standing off by herself near the casket, still in that same blue cardigan. I\u2019d been working up the nerve all morning to say something to her. Anything. I finally walked over and the only thing that came out of my mouth was,\u00a0\u201cIt was a nice service.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Lord, of all the things to say. She just nodded.<\/p>\n\n
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Then she reached into her purse and pulled out one more little slip of paper and pressed it into my hand. I figured it was another receipt. It wasn\u2019t. It was a grocery list in Grandma\u2019s shaky handwriting from years back, before she got bad.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
Cornbread mix. Bath soap. The lavender kind she liked. Diane had kept it all that time.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u00a0used<\/span>\u00a0to write these every Sunday,\u201d<\/span>\u00a0Diane said, real soft.\u00a0\u201cI kept this one.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0That was all. She squeezed my hand once and walked off to talk to the funeral home man.<\/p>\nI stood there holding that little list. And I finally understood what the rest of us had been doing those four months. We were busy counting what Grandma left behind. Diane was the only one still buying her bath soap.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
That grocery list is taped to my refrigerator now. I look at it every morning. I still haven\u2019t called her.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I sat in that courtroom and a small mean part of me was hoping my own aunt would go down for it. There, I said it. I\u2019m pushing seventy-two and … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9515,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9540,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9539\/revisions\/9540"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/reallifedaily.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}