Sep 16, 2014 3 min read

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My paternal grandmother was diagnosed in the early 1970s with “hardening of the arteries,” not long before our family was summoned to her hospital bed with instructions to prepare for her quick death.

Madge Sine Beveridge, who was then in her late 60s, was later released from the old Charleroi-Monessen Hospital to her nearby efficiency apartment, where soon she would be evicted for not being able to control her bladder.

The native of Greene County had nowhere to go besides a hospital bed in our Webster home, only to be left alone while both of my parents worked low-paying jobs and their two teenaged sons, myself included, were in school.

My dad struggled to accept advice that he put his mother “in a home,” before placing her in one in Brownsville. The home soon evicted her, too, sending her by ambulance, unannounced, back to our home because money was owed on her bill there.

Our home seemed to implode with the stress and anxiety that overtakes a family unprepared for and uneducated about what was really wrong with my grandmother. She actually had dementia that would escalate to her having Alzheimer’s disease, leaving her unable to remember to put on her clothes. She eventually forgot how to walk.

Her diagnosis only compounded our problems as my father lost his skilled labor job when his steel mill closed in 1972. He then took a job paying minimum wage, causing our family income to fall below low-income guidelines.

My mom, meanwhile, was politically connected and her influence resulted in my grandmother’s name moving to the top of the list of those awaiting a bed in Westmoreland Manor near Greensburg. What would become known as “the home,” accepted no other fees for her care other than what little she earned in Social Security benefits.

Back then the county home had the appearance of a dark, dreary and ancient institution, where residents roamed as if they were characters in the movie “One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest.”

That building, however, would be replaced with a modern facility with a well-ordered staff better educated in dealing with such patients.

My grandmother would live the remaining 17 years of her life in that institution if only because she received far better care there than what we could have been provided in our house.