I asked the nurse to print the health-care-agent form because I wanted to see the signature myself. She brought it back and I knew immediately it was my husband’s handwriting. But the date was October, three months before his second surgery, and the form named someone I’d never heard of as his health-care agent. I asked whether he’d been mentally competent when it was signed. She checked the notes and said he had been fully lucid, answering questions and signing his own paperwork. Then she showed me the witness section. The witnesses were two hospital employees, and both had written that he signed voluntarily.
I asked the nurse why nobody had told me. She said the form specifically instructed staff to contact the agent instead of me regarding changes to his care and visitation. I told her my husband had never once mentioned changing anything, and we’d been married forty-one years. She looked uncomfortable and said the agent had also requested that my visits be restricted after his second surgery because I was supposedly “causing distress.” I asked who the agent was. She read the name, and it was a man whose name I had seen only once before — on a bill my husband told me to throw away.
I called the number listed on the form. A man answered and said my husband’s full name before I introduced myself. I asked how he knew him. He said they’d been working together for years. I told him my husband had been retired for six years. He went quiet. Then he said, “Ma’am, that’s not what he told us.” I asked what my husband had told him, and he said he’d been preparing to leave me and had already arranged somewhere else to live. I looked through my husband’s belongings that night and found a hotel receipt dated two weeks before his surgery. The room was booked for two people — and the second guest had the same name as the woman who had witnessed his health-care form.
