My name is Sarah Callaway. I’m twenty-eight years old, and I work as a certified public accountant at a midsize firm in Columbus, Ohio. On February 4th, 2024, at 7:22 in the morning, I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize.
The area code was local. I almost let it go to voicemail. I’m glad I didn’t.
The voice on the other end was thin, confused, and unmistakably my grandfather’s. “Sarah, sweetheart, I don’t know where I am.”
The temperature outside that morning was nineteen degrees. He was sitting in a room he’d never seen before, in a building he hadn’t agreed to move into, holding a phone that wasn’t his.
A staff member at the facility had lent it to him after finding him standing in the hallway at 6:45 a.m., asking everyone who passed if they could call his granddaughter. They hadn’t told him he was moving. They hadn’t told me either.
My parents had driven my eighty-one-year-old grandfather, a retired high school history teacher with early-stage Parkinson’s and managed type 2 diabetes, to Lake View Memory and Rehabilitation Center on the east side of Columbus and checked him in. No phone call. No conversation.
Not so much as a text message to me. He’d woken up that morning in a strange bed with his name written on a whiteboard above the door, like a patient in a hospital ward. Because that’s what he was now.
Because they had decided that for him. I didn’t know yet that his accounts held seventy-one thousand dollars less than they should have. I didn’t know yet that my brother had been feeding my grandfather’s money into a sports betting app for the better part of six months.
I didn’t know yet that the power of attorney my parents had convinced my grandfather to sign eight months earlier had been used to authorize transfers he had never seen, never discussed, and never understood. I knew one thing. I got in my car, and I drove to Lake View.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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