Half of What You See by Paula Finn

      ​Torsten Behrens CC




Half of What You See 


“He called out your name three times,” Staci, my father’s private nurse, tells me on the phone. “The last thing he said was, ‘Tell Paula I love her. I’m just ready to go into a deep sleep.’”

The news leaves me stunned, nauseous in disbelief. An hour later, I’d receive an even bigger shock--one that would irreparably shatter a reality I’d trusted.
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I’d hired Staci nineteen months earlier. My mother had just had a heart attack and my dad was diagnosed with dementia. Mom died a week later and in the tumult that followed, Staci was a godsend to my father and me in our grief. She stayed on as Dad’s live-in caregiver and companion through several temporary hospital, nursing home, and rehab stays, while I divided my time between my apartment in San Jose and extended visits to my parents’ L.A. home. 

At 39, Staci was still pretty, her looks enhanced by black eyeliner and bright red lipstick. The moment she met my father, she had an instant rapport with him. She offered to shave him and as she was doing it, I mentioned that he’d written for several iconic comedy TV shows. “I’m shaving a celebrity!” she exclaimed. “Can I have a lock of your hair?”

“I can’t spare any,” he said.

In contrast to my dainty, demure mom, Staci stood almost six feet tall and was loud and bawdy. She wore her jet-black hair as short as a boy’s and she sparkled--all the way down to her toe rings. She was funny, and her husky voice and Georgia accent make her seem even funnier. 

When Daddy tells her he doesn’t mind the sunroof open in her Nissan she says, “You don’t mind your hair blowin’ in the breeze?” I have to laugh. All that remains of my dad’s hair is a few wisps of grey fluff. When we’re out and she trips over a step, he admonishes her, “What have I told you about drinking in the daytime!” They’d joke back and forth all day.

She told us once that she’d been home schooled. From then on, whenever Daddy corrected a mistake in her grammar, she’d point to her head and say sadly, “It’s that homeschoolin’!” They’d both laugh.
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When his neurologist first told me he thought Daddy was developing “cognitive impairment,” I was horrified. My poor father, always so glib, now showing signs of impairment without realizing it. Or worse--maybe he did realize it. 

Even tragedy couldn’t stop him from thinking comedically. After my mom died, we took him to the mortuary for the viewing. His last words to her were “Honey, I’ll see you in heaven--if I go in that direction.” While his body shrunk to translucent skin and bones, his sense of humor and personality would remain strong. 

That first Thanksgiving, the three of us had dinner in my parents’ midcentury kitchen. Thirty years earlier Mom had redecorated it, adding blue and lavender floral wallpaper to coordinate with the powder blue Formica counters. Staci cooked a small steak in the ancient Thermador wall oven. When my father announced that he might remarry, she promptly raised her hand from across the table. “I’m over here!”

I enjoyed her pearls of wisdom. She often reminded me, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” Other favorites were, “A sociopath is someone so charming you want to meet them again,” and “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” 

Openly affectionate, she frequently kissed and hugged my father. Never physically demonstrative, he started hugging me and for the first time, accepted my hugs unself-consciously. I’d squeeze his fragile frame tightly. “Hug away,” he’d say with no embarrassment. “You hug hard!”

“Tell her you love her,” Staci prompted him at the end of every phone call with me. He’d never ended a conversation that way in his life. Before long, he was saying it on his own. He even came back on the phone once just to hear me tell him I love him again. “One more time!” he laughed. 
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As co-owner of a caregivers’ agency, Staci had responsibility for hiring, firing, and paying other helpers as needed. I got the impression Gail and Carol didn’t like me and I can’t say I was fond of them, based on the things Staci said. At one point she told me Gail threatened to burn my house down. When she was let go, Carol told Staci she’d “put the fear of God in me” if I ever spoke to her again. Staci related to me the other nurses’ hateful comments about my “cheapness” and desire to keep expenses reasonable, though she herself understood and respected it. “Girl, you’re burnin’ a little wattage!” she joked when I turned on an extra bright light. 

I looked to Staci as my best friend and my rock, the one constant in a parade of short-term workers. Her detailed, humorous anecdotes about the fun she and Dad shared always lifted my spirits; their trips to the beach, going to see the Christmas lights, eating pie at 2 a.m.—and all the laughter. I made written notes of everything she told me; I wanted a chronology of my father’s final months so I could never forget that she and I did our best for him.

During Dad’s in-patient hospital stays, Staci frequently ran into his physician Dr. Berg when he made hospital rounds, or while she helped with Dad’s physical therapy. She even started seeing Berg as a patient herself and told me about her visits and all the lab tests he ordered for her. 
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Memories from my father’s final months still stab my heart. At home, he spent most of his days doing crosswords or reading, sitting up straight in the living room’s gold wingback chair, his thin legs crossed at the knees.

I picture him in the grey designer silk pajamas I gave him: shaky and frail, he wore them proudly, running his hands admiringly over the fabric of the sleeves. Mother had made all his pajamas from material she found on sale. Decades earlier, he’d stood tall in elegant clothes. His closet brimmed with long abandoned Saks Fifth Avenue suits. I’d later donate them along with all the European leather shoes he’d polished so lovingly. 

He had no fear of death--just the opposite. “…If a doctor told me I was dying, I’d walk out of his office as happy as when I went in.” When I placed a vase of fresh roses at his bedside he said nonchalantly, “Look at those beautiful flowers. I wonder which one of us will die first!”
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Before I’d hired anyone, a geriatric case manager cautioned me to put away anything I didn’t want to lose because, “They will be taken.”  

One day Staci suddenly said, “Gail’s wearing your mom’s shoes--so if anything’s missing in the house, don’t come to me!” I rush to look through Mom’s closet and discover two pairs of expensive unworn shoes missing. The three most beautiful vintage dresses are also gone.

My boyfriend had given me a crystal heart in a velvet box which I kept in the den. One day I opened the box and discovered the heart gone. The thief was clever enough to leave the empty box so I wouldn’t immediately notice anything missing. I had no idea how long ago they’d taken it. 

I always brought my most valuable ring to L.A. My mother had it made for me of her engagement ring diamonds and my paternal grandfather’s large, Russian diamond. It was the only thing I had to remember him by. I was shocked to open the ring’s case one day and discover the Russian diamond gone, the prongs that held it pried open. 

Also missing from the house was the vintage cash register piggy bank Daddy put his spare change into throughout my childhood. When I told him it was gone, he instinctively made the gesture of pulling the lever down. Through the haze of dementia, he remembered, clearly.

By the time I discovered the check fraud, my parents’ bank account had been cleaned out. Books of blank checks were stolen and forged by several people. Staci had three other workers helping and she fired them all. We weren’t sure which one of them was responsible, but they all seemed suspicious for different reasons. 
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In dementia, Daddy sometimes enjoys the delusion that I’m still a child. “Do you have school tomorrow, honey?” he asks as I help him to bed one night. My father always wanted to see me get married. I don’t dare tell him that I’m 49--and still single. 

I dread the times he asks about Mom. “Your mother…where is she?” I hesitate and he says, “She’s gone, isn’t she. My mind knew it, but I didn’t want to believe it.” 

In addition to Alzheimer’s, he’s diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and grand mal seizure disorder, he’s at risk of aspiration pneumonia, requires frequent mucus suctioning, and is fed through a tube. In his chart, a hospital nurse describes him as “gravely disabled,” requiring maximum assistance. I still insist on bringing him home. Only a licensed nurse certified in endotracheal suctioning, IV drug administering, and tube feedings can lawfully provide his home care. Staci is all those things.

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During a temporary nursing home stay, Daddy forgets that he’s not allowed to eat. People leave sweets lying around and he gets none. One day I try to distract him with a bingo game. He’s frustrated, impatient, bored. My father, who taught me gin rummy and played and won poker games against celebrities, doesn’t understand bingo. I lead him away in his wheelchair, past a plate of cookies. He reaches to grab one, and it breaks my heart to deny him that pleasure.
Back in his room, I avert my eyes as a nurse pours liquid food down the plastic tube protruding from his belly. When he asks for something to eat, she gives him a lemon-flavored swab to keep his mouth moist.

Later, while he dozes, I sit on the end of his bed alternately staring at the stained grey linoleum floor and endless I Love Lucy reruns on the TV. When he opens his eyes, I tell him, “Your smile is worth a million dollars to me.”  

“Because of the gold in my teeth?” he asks. I shake my head, “No!” as we both laugh.

But my heart sinks to hear his self-deprecation.

“I’m not worth much. I’ve done nothing productive.”

“I’ve always been deeply proud of you, Daddy!” 

“No reason to,” he says. 

One of the first things I learned to say as a toddler was, “Daddy’s so wumsy.” I’d gotten it from my mother; I couldn’t pronounce “clumsy.” I grew up with that image of him. In my forties I learned he’d been a champion athlete headed for the Olympics until he broke his ankle in his high school’s final competition. 

Mother wasn’t subtle in communicating how inept and useless she thought he was. Over the years, my childhood best friend Karen and her parents often came for dinner. Karen remembers that every time, right off the bat, Mother handed her dad a hammer or other tool and asked him to fix something in our house. Decades later I mention that I’ve heard from Karen’s father, with whom I’m still in contact. Deep in dementia, Daddy immediately says, “I wish I could do something right. I painted the bathroom; I have to finish it.” 

At the age of six, I’d started telling him, “Don’t be sad.” Already, I sensed the pain behind the jokes he wrote for a living. Perhaps more than was healthy, I cared more about his well-being than my own. I’d always felt responsible for making him happy.

Now that it was getting down to the wire, I was trying even harder. I deluded myself into believing if I packed his last months with fun and enough praise from me—he’d die feeling better about himself and his life. For this reason, I begged the doctors to do everything possible to cure his frequent bouts of pneumonia, even though they suggested comfort care over more treatment. 

I ask what it would take to make him happier.

“If I were gainfully employed.”

“You’re eighty-nine! You’ve earned the right to enjoy yourself.”

“That depends on the life I led. Some people would say I don’t deserve to live comfortably now.”

I keep hoping for positive answers. 

“How do you see yourself?”

“I’m a nobody. Nothing to recommend me.” 

I argue that that’s far from true, but he negates my words. I’m leaving for a quick trip up north that night. The last thing I hear him say is,

“I wish it were Saturday or Sunday. Because then my conscience would let me take a day off.”
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The next month, Daddy’s in the hospital with another pneumonia and I’m in San Jose, planning my return to L.A. in a few days. Staci calls and mentions that the shower door in the house leaks. She knows my preference for avoiding toxic chemicals and the shower guy will use a toxic sealer to fix the door. I decide to postpone my trip to L.A. until the job is done. 

“This is so hard on me, Paula, I am just worn out,” she tells me at one point. “The shower door company keeps cancelling and rescheduling their appointment, and I can’t stay home and wait for them when I need to be at the hospital with your dad.” She goes in to do his morning care, assist in all his physical therapy sessions, and keep him company at least ten hours a day. She calls me daily to report on his progress. 

“If your father stays in bed too long, we risk congestive heart failure. It would have set in by now if I weren’t getting him up more times than they are…They don’t have the help to do it. 
When I left him last night, he was fine. He’s recovering so great; all his labs are normal. He’ll be discharged any day now,” she assures me.

Two days later, I wake up to Staci’s voicemail. “Hey Paula, it’s Staci. We lost our dad this morning at 9 o’clock.” She’s nearly hysterical.

I’m reeling from shock. How could he have just slipped away from us? It seems impossible. A torrent of regrets floods. I should have been there! If not for that stupid shower door, I would have gone down sooner…
The only comfort is that Staci was with my father as he passed. 
An hour later, Dr. Berg calls. In the course of our conversation, I bring up the subject of Staci being his patient.

“No,” he says. “I don’t treat her. She’s never been to my office.”

An eerie sense of disbelief and shock creeps over me. 

“I’ve never even met her!” he tells me. “I’ve spoken to her many times on the phone.”

From deep in my throat comes an anguished sound. 

“…Then she was never there when you visited my father in the hospital?”

“No, never met her.”

“And she seemed like the most trustworthy of all the workers!”

“Oh my God.” he says softly. “She sounds like she’s on speed or something, I don’t know…” 

A nursing home administrator had once described Staci as “bouncing off the walls.” But I’d always admired her for her energy. 

For the first time in my life, I’m hyperventilating. The reality I’d depended upon for nineteen months is unraveling at a dizzying speed. I insist to Dr. Berg that Staci was so convincing.


“So then at least you don’t have to think of yourself as a patsy. You got fooled by the best.”

“I’d love to know the truth someday and I probably never will,” I say, calming down a little.

“It’s probably better that you don’t.”
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I call the hospital and leave a message for the nursing supervisor. When Jean returns my call, she says there’s nothing documented in my dad’s chart about a sitter at his bedside. 

“I couldn’t find anyone in physical therapy who’d ever seen her. I talked to different staff members, and nobody had seen her. The nurse who was on the morning he passed said nobody was there.” 

“And Staci didn’t do his morning care?" I ask weakly.

“No.” 

“Oh God, what recourse do I have? Could I get this in writing?”

She tells me the nursing staff would not be allowed to sign anything. 

She says Staci had called them twice a day to ask how my father was doing. That’s how she found out he’d died. I hang up defeated, trying to digest an incomprehensible reality. 

Fooled by the best? It was small consolation.

If I’d known Daddy was alone his last five weeks…nothing would have stopped me from being in L.A. And I’d been so close to coming back. Staci knew the story about my shower would keep me away, given my fear of toxic chemicals. I’d later discover that the shower had never leaked. A year earlier, she’d said my father had contagious scabies: another ploy to keep me from visiting.
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I call Staci and confront her over her lies. She’s obviously prepared a defense and she denies my accusations. But as she talks, her defense becomes less and less credible. Ultimately, her story about missing my dad’s death changed every time she told it: she’d stepped into the bathroom, she’d gone across the hall to wash her hands, she’d been away for two minutes, then twenty, she left for coffee, she went home for lunch… 

Listening to her with a new perspective, I could hear the disconnect, the mania, the craziness…the lies. 
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I’d been so invested in keeping Staci as my dad’s nurse that I’d stayed in denial despite what would have been obvious red flags to most people. She appeared to be running things efficiently and I was reluctant to rock the boat. And most important, my father loved her. Once when she and I had visited him in the hospital together, she asked him, “How are you, Honey?” Her big brown eyes gazed at him with concern. She teared up when he said, “I’m great…now that you’re here!”      

But now, doubts I’d pushed aside came flooding back: the days I’d visited my father in the hospital and I’d “just missed her there…” the times she said Daddy was articulate with her, yet I’d seen him earlier the same day and he’d seemed aphasic…the times she didn’t know he’d been transferred to another room in a facility…

I’d suspected she wasn’t always putting in the hours she claimed. But was her deception a lot more insidious?

She’d gone with me to the bank to report the fraud. She’d driven me to the Honda dealer when my car was vandalized. Was she behind that as well? One day the car suddenly started smoking and was undriveable. A mechanic told me someone had put water in the car’s oil tank. At the time, Staci was the only person who had access to it.

And there was the cassette tape I’d left on my dresser. Staci knew it was worth $2400 to me if I played it for my CPA. The morning of my appointment with him, I discovered the tape was broken. Panicked, I called a repair place and said I was bringing it in. The technician who spliced it back together told me someone had cut it in half with scissors. 

When I got home, Staci told me she’d redialed the last number I’d called and spoke to the technician herself. It could have been a mechanical failure, she said. “I wouldn’t want you thinking I broke it, since I’m the only one in the house!” she laughed.
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I remember the phone call from Holly, a nursing assistant who worked for us briefly. She’d quit because she thought Staci had Munchausen by proxy syndrome and was forcing ER visits and other treatment on my dad he didn’t need. Out of the blue she called one day to report that Staci was stalking her. “She’s sitting in her car, parked in front of my house. She’s dangerous, Paula,” Holly tells me. “If she does it again, I’m calling the cops. I saw her in the coffee shop around the corner, too.” She says Staci’s wearing an orange top.

The idea’s absurd. Staci’s at the rehab center with my father. I’m so amused by the conversation that I call her to share it.

“Staci’s not here,” the facility informs me.

An hour later I look out and see Staci sitting on my porch steps. She’s wearing her orange scrubs. 

“I don’t have any idea in the world where she lives!” she exclaims when I tell her about Holly’s call. 

That night, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, I remember Staci told me when she hired Holly that she lived a few miles from my father’s house. Her address was on her job application. 

All the things that seemed odd at the time added up to a hideous realization. Staci had never been my friend. She was a master con artist. A colorful storyteller. A gifted actress. AND a criminal.
The horror was my father’s loss: he’d received so much less than I’d intended. Hardest to accept was the image of him lying in bed alone all the hours I’d presumed she was with him.

A sickening thought comes to mind. Staci had talked about other nurses medicating their patients to have a good day themselves. Had Daddy been out cold during all those “fun times” she told me they’d had together?

Another possibility fills me with fear. I remember coming home one day and hearing Staci yelling angrily at her daughter on the phone. It surprised me to hear her so enraged and so completely out of character. Had she ever talked to my poor, trusting father that way? 
She’d accepted thousands of dollars pay for services she didn’t perform. Why didn’t I report her for fraud? 

I was afraid of her retaliation. She’d often told me, “I’m not an angry person, Paula. I’ve never had one angry thought toward you.” According to her, all the other workers hated me, and she didn’t understand why. I’ve since realized she’d conveyed her resentment of me by putting her words in other peoples’ mouths. The vicious threats she attributed to the others had all come from one person: Staci. 
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After Daddy died, my boyfriend and I moved into my parents’ house. One afternoon, a young real estate agent came to the door, canvassing the neighborhood for homes to list. “Your sister had only good things to say about you,” he tells me, smiling.

“I don’t have a sister.”  

He says he’d come by the house in January and talked to a woman who said she was my sister. She told him I was very shy and didn’t want to talk to anyone, so he’d be dealing with her alone. She said she was in the family trust and wanted to sell. She requested a print-out of the neighborhood comps, she invited him in to show him the whole inside of the house, and she asked for his appraisal.

He describes Staci in detail, including her accent and toe rings. “I’d known something was wrong with her,” he says. “The red lipstick, all that costume jewelry…” 

Daddy had been in the hospital the entire month of January. Staci had no reason to be at the house.

As I listen, the familiar surreal feeling of sickness envelops me. Daddy died before the house was listed for sale…but could Staci have gotten away with stealing it? The chilling answer: not while I was still alive. 
                                                                                                                                    *

Staci came into my life when I was most vulnerable: my mother was dying and I was alone, 400 miles from my own home and support system. I needed someone to step in immediately and she seemed perfect. I’ve since learned she has a criminal record of grand theft and has gone by several aliases. 

In the last phone conversation I had with her, she volunteered that her daughter Chloe took my diamond when she spent the night at my house. I know for a fact her daughter never spent the night when I was there…and I had the ring with me at all times in San Jose.

Chloe had grown to know and love my father. Recently out of curiosity, I looked up her social media. The first thing I saw on her Instagram page was a picture of her holding up a photo of my dad taken with Marilyn Monroe. The caption reads, “The best gift my mom ever gave me!” Staci stole it from my parents’ bedroom. 

Staci had answered the house phone a few times when my Aunt Rita called from Florida, and I believed that was the extent of their acquaintanceship. When my aunt died a few years later, her guardian sent me her personal effects. From among the old black and white photos, out popped an 8x10 color photo of Staci with her daughter. Staci knew Rita had money. How close were they?

Not all of Staci’s crimes were to enrich herself, but to gain the satisfaction of seeing me stuck with a large bill. She told me her husband noticed termites in my garage and a family of rats under the house, presumably so I’d hire an exterminator. A free inspection found there were never any pests. A neighbor said Staci was complaining to people about how cheap I was. I’ve realized she hated me for my frugality. 
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The reality I’d trusted was mostly lies, a few truths…but I’ll never know which was which. Staci knew my dad’s humor and speech patterns well enough to make up his words in conversations that never took place. Even today, I’ll remember one of her heartwarming anecdotes and smile. I have to stop and remind myself that that too, probably never happened. 

In sharing this story with others, I've learned how prevalent caregiver fraud is. Horror stories abound. I refuse to let my experience make me overly paranoid or suspicious, but it did teach me something Dr. Berg had advised: “A little skepticism always does you well.”

And it’s forced me to learn the difficult task of forgiveness. I’ve forgiven myself for the actions—and inaction—that allowed such a grievous outcome. And as forgiveness is a gift to ourselves, I’ve forgiven Staci--not because her crimes weren’t horrific--but to enable me to move on. My father’s death brought me one step closer to my own. It’s time now to make myself happy. Life is too short to carry resentment or regret. The good news is that Staci lost her nursing license so she’s not conning other families. 

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see,” Staci always said. I don’t know about “half”—but from everything I saw, my father adored her. Rather than torment myself with imagined scenarios, I choose to focus on my own memories of Staci and Daddy together, making each other laugh, and seeing him so happy with her. It’s all I have. 

It has to be enough.

​

Paula Finn is the author of Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of Television Comedy (Rowman & Littlefield). She’s written nonfiction for magazines and blogs including HuffPost, Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, and Script magazine. Her poetry has appeared in Spank the Carp and has been chosen for publication in an upcoming issue of Breath and Shadow. She’s authored ten gift books and has licensed her inspirational writings worldwide on popular gift products; her inspirational quotes can be found at Twitter.com/PaulaFinnquotes. She's a Summa Cum Laude UCLA graduate.

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