The White Book
The state of Ohio will pay you fourteen dollars a day to watch your father die, provided you can prove it on paper. The proof came in a white spiral book with carbonless pages. White sheets stayed in the book. Yellow sheets went to the Agency in a prepaid envelope on the first of each month, and a check came back on the tenth. That was the whole arrangement. Nobody at the Agency ever said the word dying, but the book knew: thirty-one lines to a page, and Dad was not going to need a second volume.
I quit the billing office at Dr. Meldrum’s practice in January to look after him. Emphysema first, then the forgetting. By March he needed the log’s full vocabulary — ambulation, transfers, medication refusal, weight trend — and I needed the fourteen dollars, because the duplex was still in both our names and the note drafted on the fifth of every month.
Dad died on the twenty-fourth of April, at home, in the rented hospital bed, with his hand on the rail like a man waiting for a bus.
The Last Week of April
My brother Gary flew in from Phoenix for two days, stood at the funeral with his phone in his jacket, and told me the sensible thing was to sell. He wired half the cost of the cremation and went home. The mortgage drafted on the fifth. I had $211, a pending interview at a dental lab, and a book with seven unfilled days in April.
So I filled them.
I knew his routine better than I knew mine. My handwriting, his days, thirty minutes at the kitchen table on the last night of the month:
08:00 — breakfast, pureed peaches, took half.
10:00 — nebulizer, tolerated well.
12:00 — lunch, refused tray, accepted soup.
02:00 (overnight) — repositioned, no skin breakdown.
I sealed the yellows and dropped the envelope at the post office before anyone could ask me where I wasn’t going.
The check came on the tenth.
The plate was the first thing. A Wednesday. I came down at seven and his lunch plate from the day before sat in the rack, washed, and the arithmetic of my own entry lined up with it — took half — and the plate had been used. Crust squares in the strainer. I live alone with a toaster and a fork; I do not cut bread into squares. I stood at the counter and built the case against myself: sleepless, on autopilot, you plated a midnight lunch and washed it and forgot. Case closed.
Then the bed. I kept the head at thirty degrees because forty made him slide down. My last entry had said forty-five, a detail I’d written because it sounded diligent. The crank had turned. The mattress sat at forty-five, empty, made tight.
Standard of Care
I want to tell you I stopped filing then. I didn’t.
That Friday I ran a test. I wrote a day ahead, in the book, in pen, and I did not file the yellow:
15:00 — client took tea in the window chair. Two cups. Refused blanket.
At 15:00 the kettle ticked in the kitchen. At 15:04 the window chair took weight — the cushion, the specific complaint of those springs, springs I had known my whole life — and the crocheted blanket I keep draped over its arm lay on the floor, and both cups were down to their leaves. One at the chair. One at my place at the table, still warm, the tag floating.
Here is what I did. I filed the yellow anyway. Here is why: at 02:00 the night before, logged as nebulizer treatment, tolerated well, the machine in Dad’s room had hissed for eleven minutes, and the hallway had smelled of him. Vick’s. Wool. The particular sour of a man who was trying to stay. Fourteen dollars a day was the story I told the Agency. It was not the story I told myself. I was writing him alive, one careful shift at a time, and something in the house had picked up the work.
Linda
The Agency sends a caseworker every quarter. Linda came in June with her rolling case and her sunburn, poured herself coffee, picked up the book like always. Then she quit turning pages.
She read for a long time. She looked up at me over her glasses the way you look at someone you have decided not to startle.
“How are you sleeping?” she said. Not how is he. “Are you eating? The book says breakfast is a problem.”
The entry was there, in my handwriting, dated three days back. All of them were:
09:10 — daughter did not eat. Stood at the counter. Threw out the milk.
10:30 — daughter refused her pills.
21:15 — daughter bathed, unassisted.
23:40 — daughter up three times.
Every one true. I had not written any of them. Bath water had run in the upstairs tub on the eleventh at 21:15 while I sat on the stairs with my shoes in my hands. I don’t take pills. On the twelfth, a bottle of them stood on my sink, label printed with my name, my date of birth, a copay sticker from a pharmacy I had never used.
Linda spoke to me for the rest of the visit the way she had spoken to Dad. Slow, bright, choices offered two at a time. Before she left, she said the file might need adjusting, that the funding could follow the care to where the care was actually needed, and she put her hand on my shoulder and called me sweetheart, and she left her card with a number written on the back.
The book ran eleven pages past anywhere I had written. One more line every day, documenting me into the client column, in my hand, on my schedule. At 15:00 something waited in the window chair. It had stopped bothering to be him. It had started learning to be me.
Discharge
The program has a form for everything. Termination was Form 12-B, one page, two blanks that mattered, and you cannot argue with a form. You can only file it correctly.
CLIENT: Richard A. Hobart
DATE SERVICES ENDED: April 24
REASON: [x] deceased [ ] relocated [ ] hospitalized [ ] other
Under caregiver signature I signed my name, and I will not tell you my hand was steady.
For one hour after I sealed it, the house did everything at once. Every time I had ever logged, overlapping. The bed cranked up and down. Water ran in three rooms. The kettle, the nebulizer, the chair springs, the television at his volume, footsteps crossing the ceiling in the path a man with a walker cuts. Two cups poured. The blanket folded and unfolded itself. Once, the front door opened onto the evening, and the evening stood in the doorway with no shape in it, and the door shut. At 23:58 the house let go the way a stopped clock stops.
The yellows I mailed that night came back from the Agency stamped no services on file, every sheet blank. Even their copy had let go.
The First of the Month
The clawback was $756 — fifty-four days of proof at fourteen dollars — and they will have it in $31 installments for two years, which is the state’s idea of mercy. I sold the dining set and his recliner to cover the note. The hospital bed went back to the rental people, who billed me for a missing crank handle. No entry anywhere carries my name in the client column. I checked.
I keep checking.
On the first of the month I still put the kettle on at 15:00. Habit, or a debt, or a want — I can’t always tell them apart anymore. I set out two cups while it heats.
The second cup goes cold on its own now, the way cups do.
I drink both.
Read to the end. Some stories shouldn't be left unfinished.