…move me into a memory care facility. The papers listed a diagnosis I’d never received. “Moderate dementia.” They also transferred my house to him, “to cover the cost of care.”
I’m seventy. I volunteer at the library three days a week. I do my own taxes. The only thing wrong with my memory is that I can’t forget what I’d just heard through my son’s phone.
I didn’t say anything. I closed the card and said, “This is so sweet. I’m going to read it properly when I get home, with my glasses.” My son looked relieved. He said there was no rush. “Just sign it before the trip, Mom.”
The trip. The “vacation” they’d been planning for me for months. A week in Florida. I understood now. The vacation was the drive to the facility.
I ate my birthday cake. I let him pay. I hugged him goodbye. Then I drove home and called the only person I trust completely, my late husband’s best friend, Harold. He’s eighty-one and a retired probate attorney.
He came over the next morning in a cardigan and a bow tie with a briefcase full of forms. “First things first,” he said. “We revoke the power of attorney. Today.”
We did. He drafted the revocation, I signed it, and we had it notarized at the bank by noon. Then Harold sent a copy to my bank, my insurance company and my son, by certified mail.
Then he asked me to see my own doctor. I did, that afternoon. Two hours of tests. Memory, reasoning, everything. My doctor wrote a letter stating I had “no evidence whatsoever of cognitive impairment.”
Harold took one look at the diagnosis on my son’s document and recognized the doctor’s name. A physician who’d had his license suspended two years earlier. My daughter-in-law’s cousin.
My son called me two days later, after the certified letter arrived. He was angry at first. Then he cried. He said they were drowning in debt. He said his wife had convinced him I’d be “happier somewhere with people my age.” He said he was just trying to “plan for the future.”
“You were planning my future without me in it,” I told him. “You put me in a facility for a disease I don’t have, so you could take my house.”
He didn’t have an answer for that.
Harold filed a report with Adult Protective Services, and the false diagnosis with the state medical board. I didn’t press charges against my son. Harold thought I should. I couldn’t do it. But I changed my will, and I changed my locks, and I made Harold my power of attorney.
My son and I talk once a month now. He’s in counseling. He apologized again last week, without excuses this time. I accepted it. Trust is a different thing. That one he’ll have to earn.
I took myself on a vacation in March. Florida, actually. A week on the beach, by myself, with a stack of library books. I sent my son a postcard. “Having a wonderful time. Memory still excellent.”
