Tyler read the initials in the storage log out loud, there in the dining hall with the TV camera rolling, and the aide holding the cake knife set it down. The initials beside fourteen residents missing belongings were D.P. Darlene Pruitt. The administrator herself.
The woman who threw my husbands dog tags in a storage bin and called them junk had been signing valuables out of that storeroom on Friday nights for months, from fourteen families who trusted her.
Tyler, my grandson, had come in his dress blues and asked to sign out his grandfathers property, and Darlene laughed for the camera and said, of course, storage is right this way. The woman with the state badge followed them, from the Ohio Long-Term Care Ombudsman, whom Tyler had called the day my yellow slip arrived. In Ohio, nursing home residents have the right to keep their personal belongings, written into state law, and fire code does not cover a dead soldiers dog tags.
Bin 114 was right where it should be. But the plastic bag inside was empty. Darlenes face went gray. The ombudsman asked for the storage log, every bin, every item, every signature, and ran her finger down the pages. It was not just Walters tags. Wedding rings, a Purple Heart, a gold pocket watch. Fourteen residents belongings, signed out of storage, all on Friday nights, all by the same initials.
I am eighty-two. I was a telephone operator in Toledo for thirty-eight years. My husband Walter served in Korea from 1951 to 1953 and wore his dog tags under his shirt every day for sixty years. They were around his neck when he died, and the hospital nurse folded them into my hand, and I have slept with them under my pillow ever since.
Last spring I moved into Maple Crest Senior Living, my hip and my eyes, I could not do the stairs. The administrator, Darlene Pruitt, did room checks every Friday, and in June she found Walters tags under my pillow and held them up by the chain like a dead mouse. What is this, Helen, a war museum. The aides laughed. Junk goes in storage, fire code. Your husbands gone, sweetie, he wont miss them. She dropped them in a bag and walked out.
My son Mark said, its her building, follow the rules. I did not argue. I asked the front desk for a receipt, and the girl gave me a yellow slip, Bin 114, and I put it in an envelope with no letter and mailed it to my grandson at Camp Lejeune.
A storage log is a record, and Friday after Friday of the same initials signing out rings and medals and watches is not housekeeping. It is theft from the elderly, the people least able to fight back, and it is exactly the thing a state ombudsman exists to stop.
Darlene faced the law, not my anger. Stealing from fourteen families in her care, on camera, with her own initials in the log, is not a thing a nursing home or a prosecutor overlooks. The valuables were traced, and most were recovered from where she had pawned them, Walters tags among them.
Walters dog tags are back under my pillow, where they have been every night since the nurse folded them into my hand. Tyler stood in that dining hall in his dress blues and made sure of it.
A war museum, Darlene called my pillow. Two little steel tags on a beaded chain, sixty years around a mans neck, are not a museum and they are not junk. They are the last of him I get to hold. I mailed one yellow slip to a Marine, and he brought his grandfathers tags home, and fourteen other families got theirs back too.