My mother took the oxygen tubing out of my father’s nose to make a point during an argument. Four seconds, maybe five, and she held it in her hand while she looked at me. “You want to see what happens when I’m not here doing everything?” she said. He was eighty-one, didn’t have the strength to reach up for it, and he looked at me, not her. I got it back on him and called the agency from the driveway with my hands shaking so badly I hit the wrong number twice. The nurse who came out that afternoon spent forty minutes alone in the room with him, with the door shut.
When she came out, she asked me to sit down. She said my father had told her something he had apparently been afraid to tell either of us. I asked whether he was confused, and she said he was completely clear about what he was saying. Then she asked me how long my mother had been managing his medications. I told her she handled most of them because she insisted she knew what he needed. The nurse wrote something down and said, “That’s not what your father’s medication record shows.”
She showed me the log from the agency, and several doses had been marked as given when the nurse knew they hadn’t been. My father had also told her that certain pills disappeared whenever my mother became angry with him. I wanted to believe there was some misunderstanding, but the nurse said she’d already spoken to the agency supervisor. Then she asked me to check the locked cabinet in the kitchen where my mother kept the medication. I found several unopened bottles hidden behind cleaning supplies, along with a notebook containing dates and times. The handwriting was my mother’s, and beside several entries she’d written only one word: “Enough.”
I called the agency back and asked them to send someone immediately. My mother was furious when she realized what was happening and insisted my father was exaggerating because he was sick. Then my father asked me to bring him the notebook. He looked at the pages for several minutes before pointing to one date from three weeks earlier. He said that was the night he’d finally realized she wasn’t just forgetting his medication. There was a second note underneath that entry, written in a different hand, and the nurse recognized it immediately. It was from another caregiver who had quit without explaining why, and beside the final date she’d written: “Ask his son what happened to the last caregiver.”
