Now, I'm not so self-assured.
Sep. 3rd, 2007 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
constanceIf you were to ask me for one of the stories that define me, one of the things I'd think to tell you would be this:
I was in my early twenties, in my last year in college and my first year out, living with a roommate in a little white frame house on Lover's Lane (no kidding!), next door to two elderly men who were nice enough, kind of odd, a wee bit standoffish, and we were young and happy to leave them to their own devices, because we were, you know, young, and busy.
That street, Lover's Lane, was a little community. The sort of place that hosts block parties; the sort of place where when you drink sloe gin fizzes on a blanket under the tree in front the neighbors drop by for sips; the sort of place where when the bad hurricanes hit you hang out in your yards with the refugees who're filling your house, and with all your neighbors too, in the aftermath during the days when you're waiting for the electricity to come on, big pots of red beans and rice, haircutting sessions in lawn chairs, masking tape marks on all the windows, and suddenly the damage and worry don't seem quite so bad.
That was just to say. We were a community, and we did look after each other, but communities often fail their outsiders. Those men next door, we waved to them and cut their grass every now and then, and once we called the police for one of them because the other had gone missing (he turned out to have been sitting in the grocery parking lot because he couldn't remember how to get home, and that was the first inkling we had that they might not be so capable of taking care of themselves). And then the elder one broke his hip, but the paramedics, when they saw the house, took both of them, while we were at work, and our neighbors, when we got home, told us that the paramedics told them that the brothers couldn't come home with the house in that condition. And our neighbors offered to help clear it out, and two or three couples were going to go over and take of it over the weekend. Did we want to help? We did, and on Saturday my neighbor T. fetched the keys from the hospital and we went over to get started.
And it was indescribably awful. There was raw sewage everywhere; no running water, so they'd been going in buckets and the buckets would spill. There was about a foot of debris on the floor, everywhere. There were rat carcases. The roaches were so bad -- and so fearless -- that they just crawled over our feet and up our legs and arms when we reached down, until we sprayed ourselves down with Raid and started clearing out with shovels.
We were there for about four hours, and during that time we filled about thirty garbage bags with stuff and were barely making a dent, before one of T.'s friends who worked for the EPA came by to help, took one look, and told us that we needed special sealed suits to finish, and to get the hell out, and to throw the clothes and shoes we were wearing away, and we'd be lucky if we didn't end up with serious bacterial infections from our good intentions.
And so we went home. And methodically (and silently) stripped down and scrubbed down and threw those clothes away. And then I sat down and called my mother and cried for twenty minutes because I was a spoiled little upper-middle-class girl whose life had never really been other than clean and shining and lovely, and I honestly didn't know that people in America could live like that, on tidy Lover's Lanes full of little postwar frame houses.
The house got cleaned up, by people who knew how to do it properly. The brothers never came home, though; the one with the broken hip never fully recovered and died within a couple of months, still in the hospital, and the other wasn't fit to take care of himself and was institutionalized, and the house was closed up, and stayed empty for several years.
That's my story. That was when I realized that sometimes you could be surrounded by caring people and still be allowed to fall through the cracks. That was when I realized that safety nets don't necessarily last forever, and that not everyone gets a happy ending. Those are not lessons I ever thought needed reinforcing.
:::
Fast-forward fifteen years or thereabouts, to tonight. I was sitting on my bed writing notes for an HP story I want to write, listening to Jim Dale read about Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches, Leory tucked against my side and Rachel at my feet. This is what I generally do with my holidays.
The phone rang. It was Miss B., my next-door neighbor, who's been in the hospital since Saturday when she had a diabetes-related episode. She'd thought she was coming home today, but she's not going to be home until tomorrow, and could I please go over and check on her parrot and feed her? I told her no problem, and she told me where the key was -- and then my heart sank when she said, Well, I want to warn you, the house is terrible, because I've been feeling so bad, because I knew. I knew that there was a reason why she'd never invited me inside, and I knew what I would see when I walked through the door.
It was the same. Maybe worse. Everything filthy, bugs everywhere, a rancid, sewery smell, so much stuff piled on the floors and against the walls that I had to force the door to be able to cram myself in sideways. The bird was okay, and I fed and watered her. I left her there, because I know Miss B. will want her to be there when she gets home. But I wanted to take her. That environment is unhealthy for her, and it's downright dangerous for Miss B., who's diabetic, elderly, unsteady on her feet.
I know that she's getting ready to move, that her landlord gave her an eviction notice but has let her stay to arrange housing (I didn't find this out until tonight). She says she's found another apartment. She says she's moving soon. She's borrowing boxes from me to pack up some of that stuff. I don't have enough boxes. I don't know how she's going to pack, with so little space to move in, and so little space to put boxes in.
I am betting her life has been like this for a while. I'm betting she moves into a place and can't care for herself and there's too much stuff and within a year or two it all disintegrates around her until she's got to leave it, and she moves into a new place and starts over. And I am betting that what she needs is not a new apartment so much as someone to take care of her.
And God help me for the selfish twenty-first-century isolationist American that I am, I can't do it. I don't have the time or the resources (financial or mental) for that kind of maintenance, and I would be out of my depth even if it were my own mother in that house. But let's be honest here: I can't take on the responsibility, but I also don't want to, I want this to be someone else's problem, and I feel as though it should be. But there's no one else, really. She has a lawyer, I know, and otherwise it's just us, a loose collection of neighbors who've got busy and let her fall though the cracks. The way we do sometimes, in America.
I feel a terrible, racking guilt over this. I feel that no one should have to live the way Miss B.'s been living, ever, for any reason. I feel that Miss B., who clearly cannot take care of herself, is making absolutely the wrong decision by moving into another apartment where she'll be on her own again. I'm thinking that what she really needs is some sort of assisted living facility, with vans to take you to the store and nurses to help you to remember exactly how much insulin you need.
I don't know what to do, or even whether I should do anything at all. I would never have known about this if Miss B. hadn't needed me to do her a particular favor that took me inside her house, so I suspect she wouldn't want me to interfere or offer advice. But even given that, how can I just close my eyes? How can I live with myself knowing that she's condemning herself to this dangerously unsanitary life? And if I do something, I'm not sure where to start. If it were you, how would you approach this? Would you approach it at all?
Really, I just want my mommy.
I was in my early twenties, in my last year in college and my first year out, living with a roommate in a little white frame house on Lover's Lane (no kidding!), next door to two elderly men who were nice enough, kind of odd, a wee bit standoffish, and we were young and happy to leave them to their own devices, because we were, you know, young, and busy.
That street, Lover's Lane, was a little community. The sort of place that hosts block parties; the sort of place where when you drink sloe gin fizzes on a blanket under the tree in front the neighbors drop by for sips; the sort of place where when the bad hurricanes hit you hang out in your yards with the refugees who're filling your house, and with all your neighbors too, in the aftermath during the days when you're waiting for the electricity to come on, big pots of red beans and rice, haircutting sessions in lawn chairs, masking tape marks on all the windows, and suddenly the damage and worry don't seem quite so bad.
That was just to say. We were a community, and we did look after each other, but communities often fail their outsiders. Those men next door, we waved to them and cut their grass every now and then, and once we called the police for one of them because the other had gone missing (he turned out to have been sitting in the grocery parking lot because he couldn't remember how to get home, and that was the first inkling we had that they might not be so capable of taking care of themselves). And then the elder one broke his hip, but the paramedics, when they saw the house, took both of them, while we were at work, and our neighbors, when we got home, told us that the paramedics told them that the brothers couldn't come home with the house in that condition. And our neighbors offered to help clear it out, and two or three couples were going to go over and take of it over the weekend. Did we want to help? We did, and on Saturday my neighbor T. fetched the keys from the hospital and we went over to get started.
And it was indescribably awful. There was raw sewage everywhere; no running water, so they'd been going in buckets and the buckets would spill. There was about a foot of debris on the floor, everywhere. There were rat carcases. The roaches were so bad -- and so fearless -- that they just crawled over our feet and up our legs and arms when we reached down, until we sprayed ourselves down with Raid and started clearing out with shovels.
We were there for about four hours, and during that time we filled about thirty garbage bags with stuff and were barely making a dent, before one of T.'s friends who worked for the EPA came by to help, took one look, and told us that we needed special sealed suits to finish, and to get the hell out, and to throw the clothes and shoes we were wearing away, and we'd be lucky if we didn't end up with serious bacterial infections from our good intentions.
And so we went home. And methodically (and silently) stripped down and scrubbed down and threw those clothes away. And then I sat down and called my mother and cried for twenty minutes because I was a spoiled little upper-middle-class girl whose life had never really been other than clean and shining and lovely, and I honestly didn't know that people in America could live like that, on tidy Lover's Lanes full of little postwar frame houses.
The house got cleaned up, by people who knew how to do it properly. The brothers never came home, though; the one with the broken hip never fully recovered and died within a couple of months, still in the hospital, and the other wasn't fit to take care of himself and was institutionalized, and the house was closed up, and stayed empty for several years.
That's my story. That was when I realized that sometimes you could be surrounded by caring people and still be allowed to fall through the cracks. That was when I realized that safety nets don't necessarily last forever, and that not everyone gets a happy ending. Those are not lessons I ever thought needed reinforcing.
:::
Fast-forward fifteen years or thereabouts, to tonight. I was sitting on my bed writing notes for an HP story I want to write, listening to Jim Dale read about Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches, Leory tucked against my side and Rachel at my feet. This is what I generally do with my holidays.
The phone rang. It was Miss B., my next-door neighbor, who's been in the hospital since Saturday when she had a diabetes-related episode. She'd thought she was coming home today, but she's not going to be home until tomorrow, and could I please go over and check on her parrot and feed her? I told her no problem, and she told me where the key was -- and then my heart sank when she said, Well, I want to warn you, the house is terrible, because I've been feeling so bad, because I knew. I knew that there was a reason why she'd never invited me inside, and I knew what I would see when I walked through the door.
It was the same. Maybe worse. Everything filthy, bugs everywhere, a rancid, sewery smell, so much stuff piled on the floors and against the walls that I had to force the door to be able to cram myself in sideways. The bird was okay, and I fed and watered her. I left her there, because I know Miss B. will want her to be there when she gets home. But I wanted to take her. That environment is unhealthy for her, and it's downright dangerous for Miss B., who's diabetic, elderly, unsteady on her feet.
I know that she's getting ready to move, that her landlord gave her an eviction notice but has let her stay to arrange housing (I didn't find this out until tonight). She says she's found another apartment. She says she's moving soon. She's borrowing boxes from me to pack up some of that stuff. I don't have enough boxes. I don't know how she's going to pack, with so little space to move in, and so little space to put boxes in.
I am betting her life has been like this for a while. I'm betting she moves into a place and can't care for herself and there's too much stuff and within a year or two it all disintegrates around her until she's got to leave it, and she moves into a new place and starts over. And I am betting that what she needs is not a new apartment so much as someone to take care of her.
And God help me for the selfish twenty-first-century isolationist American that I am, I can't do it. I don't have the time or the resources (financial or mental) for that kind of maintenance, and I would be out of my depth even if it were my own mother in that house. But let's be honest here: I can't take on the responsibility, but I also don't want to, I want this to be someone else's problem, and I feel as though it should be. But there's no one else, really. She has a lawyer, I know, and otherwise it's just us, a loose collection of neighbors who've got busy and let her fall though the cracks. The way we do sometimes, in America.
I feel a terrible, racking guilt over this. I feel that no one should have to live the way Miss B.'s been living, ever, for any reason. I feel that Miss B., who clearly cannot take care of herself, is making absolutely the wrong decision by moving into another apartment where she'll be on her own again. I'm thinking that what she really needs is some sort of assisted living facility, with vans to take you to the store and nurses to help you to remember exactly how much insulin you need.
I don't know what to do, or even whether I should do anything at all. I would never have known about this if Miss B. hadn't needed me to do her a particular favor that took me inside her house, so I suspect she wouldn't want me to interfere or offer advice. But even given that, how can I just close my eyes? How can I live with myself knowing that she's condemning herself to this dangerously unsanitary life? And if I do something, I'm not sure where to start. If it were you, how would you approach this? Would you approach it at all?
Really, I just want my mommy.
