A fragile hope

Clarice Sunderland scanned the newspaper ads at the kitchen table an hour before dawn, a gentle smile lighting her face. At her side, her husband vented his frustration over the event that got him tossed in jail and her sent to a nursing home.

"The thing is, I never did anything wrong," insisted Jennings Sunderland, 78. He spooned up the last of his Cream of Wheat and prepared to trudge across the frozen farmyard to feed 68 dairy cows. "Clarice was safe here, but she sure wasn't in that nursing home. If they didn't want me to use the chain, why didn't they just tell me?"

Her mind adrift in the maze of Alzheimer's disease, Clarice didn't seem to follow his description of their 88-day separation. But she picked up on his vexation, and her decades as a wife, mother of six and registered nurse kicked in.

"There, it's OK. It's OK," she said softly, reaching over to pat his grizzled hand. Then her eyes drifted back to the ads. "I see they've got potatoes."

Jennings squeezed her hand and relaxed into his chair. "Yah, you're right, Clarice. It's OK. We're getting back to normal. Maybe we can go deer hunting this afternoon."

She smiled.

Clarice and Jennings Sunderland are back on their farm. The notorious chain -- the one he occasionally draped around Clarice and her recliner for a few days last summer to keep her from wandering -- has been put away. But Sunderland family members are still angry over their encounter with county authorities, doing their best to help Clarice to recover from a traumatic spell away from home, and struggling again with the stubborn realities of Alzheimer's disease.

Clarice, 76, returned home on Halloween, after 300 well-wishers greeted the couple at an open house at the American Legion in nearby Bagley.

The chain has been replaced by a smoke- and door-alarm system donated by Park Rapids vendor Ken Davis. It will sound if she should wander away -- as she did several times last summer -- and alert the fire department if she gets to the stove and burns food.

Family members are doting on her now, hoping that she can regain her grounding -- as well as anyone with Alzheimer's ever can -- as she touches her familiar dishes, her recliner, the pickup truck and frequently her husband.

"Look," a visiting cousin pointed out when Clarice spotted her husband of 50 years coming into the living room. "It's been that way since she got back. Every time she sees Jennings, she just lights up."

Hope is a fragile commodity in the family right now. They know she probably has lost ground that can't be recovered. Part comes from her progressive disease, and part from the well-researched effect of moving someone with dementia from a familiar setting to an alien one -- in this case from home to Cornerstone Nursing and Rehab Center in Bagley, then to the Bagley hospital, then to McIntosh Manor nursing home 25 miles away.

A knock on the door

It started at 3:05 p.m. on Aug. 4 when two Clearwater County deputies and a social worker knocked on the door, responding to a call from Jennings' concerned brother. They found Clarice in a recliner encircled by a chain with 1¼-inch links. Jennings held one end as he sat on the adjacent couch and they watched television.

He explained that Clarice often was confused by dementia and that he was protecting her from wandering away from home if he fell asleep. He said that he and their son, Kurt, often would bring her with them to the barn or the farm fields. She could lift off the chain, he said, but that would wake him.

The deputies and the social worker consulted County Attorney Jeanine Brand -- then put Jennings in jail overnight for false imprisonment.

Clarice was taken for a checkup at the Bagley hospital -- where she had worked for 40 years, then to Cornerstone -- where she had worked for a time as a night nurse.

It proved to be a bad move.

At the nursing home, Clarice's confusion immediately deepened. She became incontinent and had difficulty feeding and dressing herself.

The daily nursing notes also show that Clarice slid back into the night-nurse role she had left in 2003, the year she began to show signs of Alzheimer's. She irritated staff by answering resident call lights before they did, shushing noisy workers, rummaging through medicine carts, checking on -- and frightening -- some residents during the night, and sitting with others in the lobby, patting them and reassuring them that all would be well.

Like any good night nurse, she did not want to go to bed and often ended her "shift" by leaving the building to drive home.

She also began to fall, and after 19 days was sent back to the hospital for two days with a fractured wrist. Cornerstone decided it was not equipped to handle Clarice. It transferred her to a locked memory-care unit at McIntosh Manor "for safety of resident."

Two rules were violated

State Health Department inspectors decided that Cornerstone violated two nursing home rules, failing to notify the family when Clarice was transferred, and providing her Alzheimer's pills once a day instead of twice as prescribed.

However, investigators said they could not prove whether a baseball-size bruise on her left breast came from neglect at the home. The family has asked the department to reconsider that finding and investigate a number of other unaddressed issues in their original complaint.

The Sunderlands' children have rallied to their father's defense and turned their ire on the county and Cornerstone.

Led by daughters Theresa McLean and Connie Krivich, both of Brainerd, the family is trying to clear their father's name and get apologies, policy changes and restitution for $20,000 in nursing home bills and still-uncounted attorney fees.

"When I first heard about the chain, I was really, really angry with Dad and Kurt," said McLean, like her mother a registered nurse. "But when I found out what really happened, I couldn't understand how the county could do this -- humiliate my father and hurt my mother."

She and Krivich also were furious about a series of steps when the county took her mother away: the social worker refused to accept names of relatives willing to care for her; the county got emergency guardianship without notifying them, and only by luck did they stumble on a court hearing about their mother and get temporary co-guardianship.

Clearwater County officials explained their actions in interviews last month, but in an e-mail last week, County Attorney Brand said they would not comment now because "the county has received a letter threatening litigation from Clarice's attorney," Ken LaBore of Minneapolis, who specializes in nursing home cases.

Jennings Sunderland "did not try to hurt" his wife, Brand acknowledged in an interview before charges against him were dropped last month. But, she said, using the chain was "holding a vulnerable adult against her will. ... He could have asked the county for help." Charging him and not letting him see his wife for a time "ensured that he could not go to the nursing home and just take her home again."

As soon as Clarice returned home three weeks ago, she began to improve: no falls, no problems eating, dressing or using the bathroom.

And no wandering.

But last week, Clarice mastered the hotel-style safety latch on the front door and tried her hand at working the key pad for the door alarm.

"We'll probably have to come up with new solutions," McLean said. "We have a relative who comes in frequently to give Dad and Kurt a break. We may need to get in more help. And I've got this new gadget, a GPS thing."

McLean pinned a piece of cloth under Clarice's shirt, a test to see if her mother might allow a GPS tracking device to be attached to her clothing.

Before dawn the next day, while she perused the newspaper ads, Clarice had found the cloth and was tugging at it.

Warren Wolfe • 612-673-7253