I was in the hospital for nine days after a fall. My son visited once. He came with a lawyer and a power of attorney form . Said it was just “in case.” I was on so much medicine I could barely hold the pen. The lady in the next bed watched the whole thing. When I hesitated, my son leaned in and whispered, “Sign it, Mom. Nobody else is coming for you.” I signed. By Friday my house was listed for sale . The woman in the window bed waited until he left. Then she pulled back the curtain, picked up her phone, and said.
“Honey, I recorded the whole thing. Every word.”
Her name was Bea. She was eighty-one, recovering from a hip replacement, and she had been a court stenographer for thirty-eight years. She told me that the way other people tell you their blood type.
“I’ve watched a lot of people get cheated in a lot of rooms,” she said. “I know what it sounds like. That lawyer never once asked if you understood what you were signing. Your nurse told him twice you were on morphine. He told her to come back later.”
I lay there with my bandaged wrist and my pounding head and tried to understand what she was saying.
“Why would you record it?”
“Because the moment that boy said ‘nobody else is coming for you,'” Bea said, “I decided somebody was.”
My son, Travis, was forty-four. He’d had a hard decade. A divorce, a business that never got off the ground, a gambling problem he swore he didn’t have. I had lent him money so many times I stopped counting. I always thought that if I just kept helping, one day he’d be okay.
I didn’t think he would sell my house while I was lying in a hospital bed.
Bea had a granddaughter, Nina, who was a social worker. Nina came that evening. She listened to the recording on Bea’s phone, then she looked at my chart, then she looked at me.
“Mrs. Castle,” she said gently, “a power of attorney signed while you were medically incapacitated can be challenged. You have witnesses. You have medical records. You have this recording. You’re going to be okay.”
I had heard people say that before. This was the first time I believed it.
Nina called the hospital’s patient advocate. The patient advocate called the hospital’s lawyer. The hospital’s lawyer, it turned out, did not appreciate outside attorneys bringing legal papers to heavily medicated patients without staff present. By Monday morning there was a formal complaint filed with the state bar against Travis’s lawyer.
My doctor came in and wrote a letter on official paper. It said that at the time of signing I was under the influence of opioid pain medication and was not, in his medical opinion, capable of understanding a legal document.
Nina found me a lawyer of my own. A real one. She came to my hospital room with a legal pad and a box of tissues and treated me like a person instead of an obstacle.
On Wednesday the power of attorney was revoked. On Thursday the realtor received a letter. On Friday the listing disappeared.
Travis called me that evening. I let it ring twice. Bea looked over at me from the window bed and gave me a nod.
I answered.
“Mom, what is going on? The realtor says the sale is frozen. Some lawyer is calling me. What did you do?”
“I woke up,” I said.
“I was trying to help you! You can’t live alone in that house anymore. You fell down the stairs!”
“I fell on the ice by the mailbox, Travis. Not the stairs. You’d know that if you’d asked.”
Silence.
“How much do you owe?” I asked.
The silence went on so long I thought he’d hung up. Then he said, very quietly, “Sixty-two thousand.”
There it was.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I was too tired for either. I just said, “I love you. I’m not giving you my house. And I’m not giving you any more money until you go to a meeting. A real one. And bring me the paper that proves it.”
