She said she’d been in the room. Not the room where it was signed — the bedroom, thirty feet down the hall, and she’d been told to stay there with the door shut for about twenty minutes on a Thursday afternoon in March 2021, which she remembered because it was the only time in four years anyone had asked her to leave a room. She’d written it in her daily log, the way agency caregivers do, in a spiral book she still had in a box in her garage. 2:40 — asked to step out. 3:05 — returned. Client tired, tearful, did not want lunch.
Four years of those logs. Blood pressure, meals, moods, visitors, every day, in a woman’s handwriting nobody in that family knew existed. The investigator asked for the box. It has entries from January and February of that year noting that my mother-in-law was confused about what month it was, twice, and that she’d asked the caregiver on two occasions who was living in the front bedroom, which was her own son.
The notary commission was revoked in October. The will went into litigation in November and the caregiver has been deposed twice and has never once been shaken on anything, because she isn’t remembering — she’s reading. My brother-in-law’s attorney tried to get the logs excluded as hearsay and lost, and then tried to characterize her as disgruntled, and she said, on the record, that she’d been paid on time every week and had liked the job and had loved the old woman.
The family did fight in the end. That’s the part that still surprises me. Three years of everyone agreeing it wasn’t worth it, and then a caregiver produced a spiral notebook and suddenly there were four of us on the same side of a table. My husband hasn’t spoken to his brother since August. His sister flew in from Oregon in January for a deposition and stayed nine days at our house, and we hadn’t spent nine consecutive days in the same building since 1998.
