Looking for Aunt Ethel

On a recent trip to Reno we met up with cousin LuAnn who lives in a wonderful place on the banks of the Truckee River in downtown Reno.  On a day trip, LuAnn drove us to Dayton, Nevada to see our aunt Ethel.  Imagine our surprise when we drove up and found the remains of a burned out mobile home!

The place had been so badly burned that there was red caution tape everywhere and “do not enter” signs posted about.  We went in anyway and rummaged through what remained, being very careful about where we stepped.  We didn’t find much so we decided to rummage through the outbuildings, of which there were six or seven.  It seems that Uncle Paul never threw anything away, a habit of many people raised during the Great Depression era.  Aunt Ethel’s home site was about two acres in a very sparsely populated section of Dayton, itself a very small town and Uncle Paul had managed to fill all the buildings and most of the land with his collection of stuff.

After an hour or so of rummaging, we began to knock on the doors of neighboring homes to see if we could find out what happened to Aunt Ethel.  This, in itself, was a little unnerving since most of the neighboring homes were in a similar state of “junkdome” and I expected any moment to be confronted with an unshaven, toothless resident brandishing a shotgun.  We knocked on the doors of four adjacent homes and only one resident responded even though they all appeared to be home at the time.  The man who did answer his door would have fit right in with the cast of “Deliverance” and was so drunk he could hardly stand up, but he was friendly enough.  He told us that the fire had taken place “about a month ago” and that Aunt Ethel had been taken out by the firemen, through the bedroom window.  He did not know whether she was dead or alive.  I thanked him for the information and left him with my phone number in case the neighbors he knew could add something.

We then visited the local sheriff’s office but couldn’t find anyone there so we headed back to Reno.  The next day, I began calling the local hospitals to see if I could find Ethel.  On the third or fourth call, I found out that she had been admitted to the hospital right there in Reno, about five miles from where we were staying, but “rules” prevented them from telling me any more.  The following day I went to the hospital and spoke with people in the public relations department but all they could add was that Ethel had been admitted three months prior (The fact that Ethel’s neighbor missed the date of the fire by 200% will give you some clue as to his mental state!) and that she had been discharged to a long term care facility whose name they could not divulge.  As I was leaving, one of the employees who had overheard my conversation handed me a sheet of paper with a list of 6 long term care facilities that their hospital did business with.  How nice was that?

We left Reno the next morning so I did not have time to call the list until we got home.  I found Ethel on the very first call and informed cousin LuAnn who then went to visit with her.  She was alive, but not in very good shape.  She was on a respirator and did not respond to LuAnn's voice or touch.  Until just a few minutes ago, while I was writing this piece, that is all we knew about Ethel.  Then, I did a search of the Social Security files and discovered that Aunt Ethel passed away sometime after LuAnne’s visit.