I was cleaning out my mother’s car to sell it and found a parking receipt from a hospital in another state. It was dated two days before she died. She was in hospice here, and she hadn’t left this county in a year. The car had four hundred and eleven miles on it that week, and I have the odometer photo from the estate paperwork. Somebody drove her car nine hours and back while she was dying, and every person who had a key was at her bedside. The hospital’s parking system keeps plate records for seven years, so I wrote to them, and what came back was…
The license plate had entered the parking garage at 8:14 that morning and left at 6:37 that evening. The name attached to the parking account wasn’t my mother’s, and the hospital wouldn’t tell me who had registered it. I asked whether they could confirm whether anyone had used the car to visit a patient, and they said there was no patient record connected to the plate. Then the parking office sent me a photograph from the garage entrance. The person driving the car had their face turned away, but I recognized the coat they were wearing. It belonged to my mother.
I called the hospice and asked whether my mother had left the building that day. They checked the records and said she had been in her room the entire afternoon. Her nurse had even written that she was too weak to sit up without assistance. I showed the nurse the photograph, and she stared at it for several seconds before asking me where I’d found it. Then she told me something I’d never heard before: my mother had asked for her purse and car keys that morning. The nurse had refused because she thought my mother was confused, but someone else apparently gave her access to them.
I went through my mother’s belongings again and found a second set of car keys hidden inside an old sewing box. There was a hospital visitor badge attached to the key ring, dated the same day as the receipt. The name printed on it was my mother’s full name, but the photograph wasn’t hers. I called the hospital back and asked who had been issued that badge, and the woman on the phone became very quiet. She finally said the badge had been printed using information from an old patient file that had been closed years earlier. Then she asked me one question: “Are you certain your mother was the woman who died in your hospice?”:::
