Dad asked me to make an entry in his check registry, in which he keeps a scrawled and unnumbered untallied record of his checks. And that is where I discovered the $500 check made out to his dear hospice nurse.  The image of the entry bounced erratically around my brain for hours, seeking but finding no possibility of legitimacy.  I asked Mom and Dad if I could discuss something with them (“Certainly!”), explained about finding the registry entry, and asked what they could tell me anything about it.  Dad offhanded the check as a simple Christmas gift, and turned back to his book.  I pressed him about why this gift in this amount to this person.  “I just thought she needed it,” he demurred, not looking up.  I pressed further: but what did she say that led you to believe she needed money?  He mumbled something about hard times and her husband being out of work, with Christmas coming.  I launched, carefully, into a lecture about his days of monetary magnanimity being over, that his bank balance was low and diminishing, that giving his money away sabotaged my ability to take care of him, that my fiduciary duty to him required me to raise the subject of financial irregularities with him, and that, besides all these, his hospice nurse playing on his sympathies and accepting a gift violated hospice company policies, Medicare hospice licensure rules, and nursing ethics.  What’s more, for a person in a position of trust and confidence (like a hospice nurse) with a vulnerable adult (like him) to obtain that vulnerable adult’s funds (like a $500 check), constitutes the crime of exploitation of a vulnerable adult.  But I asked her if there were any rules that prevented her from accepting a gift, and she said no.  Just a week earlier, Jeanette had warned Dad about another exploitative person who might ask him for money, and he had retorted that he could “recognize a con.”  And yet here he had been conned.  “I haven’t lost my mind,” he insisted to me, but he could see now he had been played, and he felt embarrassed.  “I won’t do that again,” he promised.  He looked to Mom, “We won’t do that again.”  Lying in bed pondering the bizarre situation, I realized I possessed a new power, namely, the power to get the nurse fired: a power I did not want.  We liked this nurse; we trusted her; she is a nice woman and a good nurse; and I did not relish reporting her and causing her pain.  And that is part of the con.  My sympathies were being played, too.  So, I used the power I had been given: I called my contact at the hospice company and reported the occurrence of the gift.  The same afternoon the company director called to tell me the gift had been investigated and confirmed, the nurse had been fired, the nurse would be referred to the Board of Nursing, and the $500 would be reimbursed.  Thank you so much for calling.  Sudden and severe, but not surprising.  I fought to not feel responsible for the devastation just wrought in the life of the nurse and her family, due to my report, urging my brain to believe the truth that these were direct and terrible consequences of her actions, not mine.  But I will not tell Dad that I reported the nurse and that she was fired, because his brain would lose the battle, and he would berate himself for giving the forbidden gift and destroying the gifted.

(Pictured: brick wall, with ivy, surrounding my daughter’s Chicago apartment back patio.)