She had raised my father alone after my grandfather died. She had buried a husband, run a household, and managed a legal office simultaneously, and she did not miss things.
Which is why, when my father started telling her she was “getting forgetful,” she got suspicious instead of scared.
“A woman who ran a law office for thirty-one years knows what a durable power of attorney can do,” she told me, as we drove toward the courthouse. “I signed a temporary one after my knee surgery, for the six weeks I couldn’t drive. Temporary, Ivan. It expired two months ago.”
“So he’s been using an expired POA?”
“That’s what I need the courthouse to confirm.”
At the county courthouse, we pulled the records.
And Grandma — who apparently still knew exactly how to read a legal file — went very still.
The temporary POA she’d signed had indeed expired.
