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  • Asking for Help*
  • Stephanie Myers Schim, PHCNS-BC (bio)

I’m lost driving in the city and I’m running late. Somehow I’ve missed a step on the computer map page I have on the passenger seat. I stop in a gas station to ask directions to Oak Hill Avenue. The woman behind the counter gets out a city map and starts to show me where I am and then a young man paying for gas comes to offer help. “Where you trying to get to?” he asks. I give him the street address and he says, “Oh. You want the welfare office!” He draws me a map and talks me through the landmarks and turns.

I’m going to my yearly meeting with the social worker at the county Dept. of Jobs and Family Services. Someone must show up in person annually to continue the state Medicaid payment for my father in his nursing home. While my dad has income from retirement savings and Social Security, it doesn’t amount to quite enough to keep him in a decent long-term care facility, a circumstance that many seniors face.

My father was born in 1918, the year of the great flu epidemic. When he graduated from high school he worked for several years until he could save and borrow the money to start college. He was the first in his family to go to college in spite of his parents’ belief that he should stay at home and get a good job in the steel mill office. At the end of college World War II was waiting and he enlisted in the U.S. Navy where he served in the South Pacific. Dad stayed on in the Navy after the war and helped to navigate Rear Admiral Richard Byrd to the South Pole on the U.S.S. Philippine Sea in 1947. After the service he and my mother taught in the Panama Canal Zone for a couple of years and then returned stateside so that Dad could enroll in a seminary. Those were the days when seminarians were not supposed to have families to support, so it was difficult for my father, mother, and older sister to make ends meet—especially when their housing burned to the ground on a cold day two months before my birth! My dad went on the build churches and serve congregations in Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Virginia. For more than 50 years he served others as a minister of the church. He taught preaching, sang in a community chorus and with a local opera company, and in early retirement learned to play the recorder. When my parents decided to move into a retirement community 15 years ago, my dad was active and engaged and able to be the primary caregiver for my mother. [End Page 941]

He never made much money as he spent his professional career helping others. Now, his savings are gone and his meager life insurance cashed out. My sister and I help as much as we can, but the gap is more than we can cover. My father did not expect to live past 90. We did not expect him to live more than six months after my mother died in 2005. But he has defied the odds and surprised us all. He has a strong heart. So again I go grudgingly to the county welfare office with my metaphorical hat in hand.

The office has moved since last year’s appointment. They were in a warehouse-like vacant department store space in a particularly seedy part of town. Now they have moved to a hilltop hospital facility alongside the public health department, the county morgue, and the sheriff ’s office. I park and find Building D just as my watch says 9 a.m. I make it with just seconds to spare. The line to enter moves quickly and the woman assigned as a greeter helps with directions and remains patient while I look up my father’s case number. This is the key piece of information for all appointments since they cannot keep track by names. I dig in the files I brought and find...

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