This is what happened when I drove my Mercedes to pick up food stamps

[truedelphi]

7. That lady's Mercedes reminded me of a client I had,

One of the few disabled people I worked for through a County agency. (County Agency paid very little, and often the clients were more demanding than people who paid better.)

Anyway, this poor woman had been a young successful executive, I think in insurance. Then in her final years as a thirty something, she found out she had ALS. As her illness took over, she sold off her house, and her car, and many of her belongings.Her lovely stereo was soon replaced by a boombox, and so on.

She was smart, kind, funny and altogether wonderful. She was also dying.

But every time I came, my visit with her coincided with at least one visit from someone from the County Department of Social Services. They came there to see if she really needed food stamps, or really needed disability payments. And her two thousand dollar mattress, the only thing that she had left from her years of working as an exec, that was almost all the social workers would discuss.

"You could sell it" "You don't need it" and on and on. As though anyone interested in the purchase of a $ 2,000 mattress would buy a used mattress.

One day the social worker who had been on a rant about the mattress left early. The client and I watched her from the balcony, as she passed below us. I nudged my client and softly whispered, "Or we could avoid keeping it by hauling it out here and dropping it on her head!"

This made her laugh, but I still can never forget the lack of respect and indignity heaped on this poor sick woman.