No Next of Kin

I spent nine days in the hospital with pneumonia. My daughter Karen, who lives twenty minutes from that hospital in Marion, Iowa, filled out my intake paperwork herself the night she drove me in. On day four a young nurse named Bethany gently asked whether there was anyone they should call – my chart said “no next of kin.” I told her there was no one. On day seven I asked to see the chart. There it was in Karen’s handwriting, the same hand I taught cursive at my kitchen table: EMERGENCY CONTACT: none. NEXT OF KIN: none. She had written it twice.

I said nothing for four months. Then in February a letter came from an attorney’s office about my house on Bittersweet Lane, and I finally understood. Karen had begun a guardianship petition. To have me declared unable to manage my own affairs, it helps enormously if the record shows an elderly woman alone, with no family, no contacts, no one checking on her. She had not forgotten to list herself. She had been building a file.

I took that letter and the copy of my chart to a lawyer named Ruth Aldana in Cedar Rapids. It took two hours. The petition was withdrawn in March, quietly, before it ever reached a judge. Karen has never once mentioned it, and neither have I.

She still calls on Sundays. We talk about her furnace, which is now fixed, and about my granddaughter, who is fifteen and does not know any of this. I have a new emergency contact on file – Bethany’s supervisor helped me change it, and I put down my neighbor Marguerite, who is eighty-one and who has never once written none. Some people erase you slowly, on paper, where they think you will never look – and sometimes the kindest stranger in the room is the one who hands you the pen.