King to Pawn?

One morning after breakfast, Yosef decided to run some errands. He took the car. Under normal circumstances, this would be unremarkable, but Yosef had cancer, and he was taking pain medication that impaired his cognitive ability. He ended up in a fender bender and was taken by ambulance to the hospital for minor injuries. Thankfully, no one else was hurt. After that, his wife refused to be in the car if he was driving, and she offered to be the designated driver.

“He was outraged,” recalls his stepdaughter, Bayla. “He insisted he was perfectly capable of driving, and refused to capitulate, even though it was downright scary to drive with him. His reflexes were so poor that he made jagged, abrupt moves while driving, and sometimes slammed on the brakes in the middle of the highway.”

Bayla’s parents fought for weeks about the car issue, with her stepfather insisting he was still competent behind the wheel, and her mother claiming the opposite. It fell to Bayla to convince her stepfather to give up driving.

“I had to play the bad guy,” says Bayla. “I had little ones at the time and I told my stepfather, very gently, that I loved him dearly but that I was terrified of his driving and and that if, chas v’shalom, anything happened while my kids were in the car, I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to forgive myself for letting him drive them. So I made a firm rule that if we were all together, only me, Mom, or my husband could drive.