I asked the nurse to show me the entire form. The signature looked enough like mine that for a second I understood why someone had accepted it. But the date underneath it was from August 14, when I was in Springfield with my daughter. I showed her the photograph I’d taken that afternoon, and she said she’d make a note of it. Then she printed the durable power of attorney from the hospital file. The agent wasn’t my husband, and it wasn’t me. It was a woman whose name I’d never heard. I asked how she could possibly be his health-care agent when we’d never signed anything. The nurse said the document had been notarized outside the hospital and uploaded with the DNR.
I called my husband’s cardiologist and asked whether he’d ever discussed changing his wishes. He said my husband had told him twice that he wanted every available treatment and that nothing about that had changed. Then he looked at the date on the DNR and went quiet. He said the order had been requested after someone called the office claiming to be my husband’s legal representative. I asked who had made the call. He gave me a number. I knew it immediately because that same number had been calling our house every Thursday for months and hanging up whenever I answered. The cardiologist said the caller had also provided a copy of a document showing my husband had appointed the woman as his agent.
Then I asked the hospital to pull the original notarized document instead of the scanned copy. The notary’s stamp was from our county, but the notary had written an address in the margin — an address I hadn’t seen in twenty years. It was the old house my husband owned before we married, the one he told me he’d sold in 2003. I drove there that afternoon and found a woman living inside. She opened the door before I knocked twice and looked straight at me. Then she said, “You’re his wife. He told me you’d eventually come looking.” I asked who she was. She stepped aside and pointed to a framed photograph on the hallway wall. It was my husband, twenty-four years younger, standing beside her with a baby in his arms.
