Another travel day, but first we stopped to visit Grandpa Jeff. He lives at a high-class assisted-living facility in Minneapolis. We signed in and walked around the lobby while Grandpa was called. Bodie made several friends among the crowd waiting for the dining room to open for lunch.
“Jeff didn’t answer his telephone, do you want to go knock on his door?” I was asked by the lady in charge.
“We really don’t want to bother him; he didn’t know we were coming.”
“Well, I’ll just run up and check on him, he hasn’t been down yet,” she said. It was 10:55. She then verified his room number with a gal behind a desk, took a key, and headed to the elevator.
She was going to go into his room! I drew mental pictures of all the possible outcomes to her fact-finding expedition and was really uncomfortable with one of them. The Worst-Case Scenario, I called it.
It’s just that we were on a tight schedule and The Worst-Case Scenario involved paperwork, telephone calls, staff and resident interviews, a determination as to final wishes, and more telephone calls.
The dining room doors had opened and Bodie’s friends had all gone to lunch leaving us alone in the lobby waiting like Pavlov’s dog for the “ding” of the elevator. Finally, it came.
“Well, I went in his apartment and shook him pretty good, but just couldn’t wake him,” I was told.
“Yeah, he’s a pretty heavy sleeper,” I said from experience, having tried to wake him up on a visit three years earlier.
“Do you want to go and try?”
“Oh, no,” I replied as I realized there was a scenario worse than The Worst-Case Scenario, “we’ll just leave him a note and stop by next Saturday evening.”
While I was writing the note, there were mumbled conversations between the lady in charge and the gal behind the desk. I wrote faster.
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