The mail takes over

It covered every surface in the house, filled voids under, on, and behind furniture, threatened to collapse the floors. Boxes of it sat in the family room waiting to be sifted through. So much mail was arriving daily that Mother had her friend Bill install a slot in the side garage door and place a large cardboard box behind it. Each day the mailman eschewed the tiny mailbox and shoved reams and reams of paper through the slot: catalogs full of junk, sweepstakes entries and prize notifications; letters from psychics in Gibralter, France, Spain, and Canada; propaganda from Tom Delay, solicitations from senior citizen "lobbying" groups and bogus charities; brochures for anti-aging products, magazines galore, and so on. Packages, of course, continued to be left on the front porch. Legitimate mail, such as bills, got lost in the flood.

Publishers’ Clearing House and United States Purchasing Exchange

For years, my mother received a steadily escalating stream of packages. In the early nineties, when she was still living in Hot Springs, I started seeing a lot of boxes from United States Purchasing Exchange. Mother’s only explanation was that it was a noble entity with the lofty purpose of opening up trade with China. Years later, stumbling upon an invoice, I noticed that USPE had a sweepstakes. Of course!

That Publisher's Clearing House has long targeted the elderly is widely known. Mother ordered much more than magazines from PCH; she ordered all manner of junky stuff, with several boxes often arriving in a single day. She quickly stashed them under a bed, in a closet or in the garage before we could notice them (or so she thought). The Prize Patrol's arrival was always two weeks or thirty days or sixty days away.

Even as early as 1991, Mother's credit card bills revealed that she was spending around $400 per month on orders from USPE, Michigan bulb, and PCH. Multiple orders to Michigan Bulb in a single day were not unusual. Later on, the list grew to include sweepstakes run by such venerable brands as Reader's Digest and American Express.

Can you guess what our Christmas presents were like? Cheap jewelry, flimsy kitchen paraphernalia....

Once I gained control of my mother’s mail in 2004, my sister and I returned 16 packages to PCH in the first two weeks alone. When I cleared out the house to sell it in 2005, every nook and every cranny of every room, closet, piece of furniture, and the garage that didn’t contain boxes of junk mail were filled with thousands of dollars worth of these trinkets, many of them still in unopened packages.

United States Purchasing Exchange and Michigan Bulb went out of business, but Publisher's Clearing House is still going strong.

Selling the car

What was going on three years ago, in August 2004? Under Arkansas guardianship laws, I can’t sell so much as a toothpick from my mother’s assets without a court order. Thus, in dire need of money to support my mother, I filed a petition with the court to sell a few things – my mother’s car, her lots in Hot Springs, and her coin collection. The petition was granted around the end of the month. What I really wanted to do was sell her house, but my lawyer feared the judge would deny such a request at this stage.

As guardian, I had the authority to stop Mother from driving and did so without delay. Her car lived at my sister’s house in Benton once we confiscated it. Mother has forgotten many things in the past three years, but not the loss of her car. Three years later, she is still furious and tries to access her assets so she can buy another one.

Incredibly, she managed to renew her driver’s license last year. I don’t know how she did it, but she convinced Bill’s son to to take her to the DMV to renew it. What she hasn’t figured out yet, is that the license has been removed from her purse. We won’t tell her who did it, right?

Sadly, there is no way to stop a person with dementia from renewing a driver’s license in Arkansas, no safeguards at all. All she had to do was pass a vision test – I doubt that she could have passed the written test, but it is not required for renewal. If she could get her hands on a car, she would probably kill someone. Check out the way the California DMV deals with drivers with dementia. More states should pay attention.

The car was easy to sell. I sold it to a friend who loves it and still drives it – a 1998 silver gray Volvo.

Three and a half years after the FBI called

Those awful events of 2004 are far behind me now. But for a long time, falling asleep each night, I was haunted by ghostly visions of my diminutive mother pacing in dark corners of my bedroom. She was always wearing her bathrobe and talking on the phone with her head bent over as if trying to keep me from hearing. With time, the nocturnal images have faded, and I dwell on those days less and less.

In the first 18 months or so of the crisis, there were places I couldn’t let my mind go. There were frauds too painful to investigate, bank statements I couldn't bring myself to view, checks that broke my heart. The distance created by the passing of time and the perspective that retirement has bestowed have blunted the pain and revulsion, allowing me to reflect upon those days and write about them with less angst.

Mother is crazier now, but safely ensconced in a retirement home since December 2004. Scam artists haven't bothered with her in a couple of years (she has no money to give them), and she seldom thinks of the lotteries and "investments" and banks unless somebody reminds her. When that happens, she justs tells everybody that Bank of America stole all her money.

Elder scams don’t seem to be in the news so much lately, but I don't doubt their continued proliferation. Watching a Dateline expose a couple of weeks ago gave me chills – the lonely, vulnerable victims, the international base of operation, the elusive perpetrators. They're still out there.

Yesterday, I found a 14 minute phone call to a porn 800-number -- foxy ladies -- in Mother's cell phone records. I suspect that she stumbled on the number by accident, fooling around with her new cell phone. Interesting, however, that she listened for 14 minutes. I had AT&T disable internet access and text messaging and cancel the MediaClub subscription that had mysteriously appeared on her bill.