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Now, I'm not so self-assured.
If 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.
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I like the idea of calling a council on aging to see if there's a course of action I can take. I'll try to track them down tomorrow. Thank you so much for the advice, and I wish you all the luck in the world with your mother; from my own extremely limited experience, it will come in handy. *hugs back*
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{{hugs}} I hope someone's able to help her. How awful.
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I get the impression that she's outlived her relatives, and that now she relies on few neighbors, her lawyer, and a few old friends/acquaintances to lend a hand every now and then.
You're not the only one to suggest calling an agency for advice, and I think it's an excellent idea. I'll do that in the morning, and hope that they can steer me in a direction that'll help her but limit my own involvement, because yes, I'm very much afraid of this consuming my life. :/ *hugs*
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And if you DO get involved, to make sure you place direct limits on what you're willing to offer. Don't say, "Is there anything I can do?" The answer might very well be "Help me clean up." Instead, "May I offer suggestions on new apartments?" tells her exactly you are willing to do.
I'm currently in a weird situation in which I moved out of my apartment, stayed with a friend for a week, then housesat for two other friends for a total of 27 days, then signed a lease on an apartment, then moved in, then moved out three days later, and am now housesitting again until the 9th. I am, in effect, homeless, in that I do not have a place of my own in which to live. But this is a highly different situation, since I have the money and the presence of mind to find a new apartment (I just lack the time, what with classes starting tomorrow and my two course syllabi not yet finished). I also have friends who are delighted to have me as a houseguest if I do the cooking all week or trade for a couple nights' babysitting. But the similarity is that many of them have asked, "Is there anything I can do?" And it's hard for me to answer, because I need someone to fix it, and I don't know where the limits to what people are offering me - are they offering to help me look through the newspaper for an apartment, or do they really have a spare room they'd be willing to let me stay in for a few weeks?
Again, this isn't even remotely a comparable situation, but my point is that it's hard to ask for help even when people offer if you are afraid of exceeding a limit that you don't know is there. So offer her something specific that meets your time, finances, and emotional capability - not a general "if you need anything."
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Anyway, it's valuable advice, and I shall think carefully about what, exactly, I feel comfortable offering up. Maybe house the parrot until Miss B. gets settled? Tape up the boxes for her?
I'm wishing you lots of luck (and time!) in your own housing crisis. If I were anywhere near, I would totally go hunting for you -- I love house/apartment hunting, and if I could do you a favor by going on a hunt: win-win!
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Dennis claims there have to be resources out there, and maybe there are. Oh, I hope it's not naive to hope that there are services that are accessible and comprehensive, and that it wouldn't be upsetting to Miss B to accept this type of assistance. I know its touchy even with one's own relatives when it comes to arranging for help. My own grandparents pulled off the "We're fine, just fine!" ploy for a long time before my dad surprised them one day and found the house in shambles and discovered that they were living on Dinty Moore stew and Dreyer's ice cream. It must be so hard for people who've been independent for so many years to admit that they can't take care of themselves anymore. I think if this were me, I'd do some calling around and tell Miss B. what was out there, then follow
I'm so sorry you're in this position. I wish I could help.
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One of the hardest things for me in this is knowing that if it were me in that situation, I might well resist very hard, too. For people who value autonomy, allowing other people or agencies control over their lives is more than just difficult. It's unwelcome, an invasion of privacy and an indignity. And so I am really wary of overstepping my bounds -- but at the same time, I feel so, so strongly that she mustn't be allowed to go on like this indefinitely. :/
You are all helping, believe me. I wasn't kidding when I said I was panicky, and reading all this wonderful advice from my kind and wise friendslist is helping me to calm down and sort things out. THANK YOU, to both you and Dennis. If I were Jan, I wouldn't mind being aging and alone as long as you guys were around.
(My mommy is such a softie that she'd burst into tears before I did! She's not good for tough love -- that's my dad's job -- but she is amazing at empathy, thank God.)
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I don't know anything about who to call to catch people who have fallen through the cracks. I saw your other post, mentioning nutrition, and she sounds like someone who'd benefit tremendously from Meals on Wheels. It's a person at her door bearing healthy food. The person can't talk long, and the food might not be what she'd choose, but it's two things she seems to need. If it's not run through the council on aging, they'd know who to call about it.
I don't know if it's because my grandmother lived in a very rural county, but she had some housekeeping through her council on aging. One day a week, or every other (can't remember) for dusting and vacuuming, but it's also someone in the house to talk to for a spell.
The common thread here is exactly what others have suggested--call the council on aging. If you call, you're not closing your eyes, and you'll be able to live with yourself because you'll have made someone else aware of her need, someone who has more resources and capacity to do something.
You're right that it's not your responsibility, but your concern shows that you don't want to do nothing. I don't know how much I'd do, but I'd make the call and see what they had to say.
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I'm a layperson, I know, but I do wonder if there's not some pathology at work here. She's showing signs of being a classic late-stage compulsive hoarder; and if she is one, not only is a simple cleaning regimen not going to work on her (not even if someone else is doing the cleaning), but trying to get someone in there to get started would be perceived on her part as a threat, and could do her serious damage.
Still, though, it's worth a call to the council on aging to find out if there are advocacy groups who can deal with her compulsion while allowing her to keep her dignity and autonomy. I have the number, and I'm planning to call this afternoon.
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I am a little frustrated, can you tell?
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There was someone whose journal I read a few months ago who had similar housekeeping issues of their own. I don't know if it was as bad as you describe, but it was bad to the point that the person wouldn't allow guests over and was only moved to take action because the landlord was planning to come over to inspect something. She ended up hiring a cleaning crew who were very thorough and very respectful and got her life back in order. I believe she made arrangements for them to come back in on a regular basis to keep things from getting out of control.
But seriously, the call to the council on aging is probably the most effective way to start the ball rolling, and you can go to sleep at night knowing that you've been the agent for real change in Miss B.'s life just by doing so. To take responsibility for this yourself would be pure madness and honestly, probably not that effective. This is a job for professionals. It would not even help if this were someone you love -- it is not a failure of love that makes this job too big to tackle. It is simply too big for one person to tackle. That's why there is a council on aging in the first place.
So make that call. That call is an act of pure generosity. That call is going to be the start of everything that needs to happen.
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I suppose it's lucky for me that I was able to see her house for the first time when she wasn't around, and so I can think carefully about ways I can address her that don't sound like judgment/condemnation. I like your suggestion of asking if I can call someone to help her clean up or pack or move, very much. Thank you for weighing in, my love.
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Sending you so much ♥.
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That is a tragic sentence. :/
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I think that the hospitalization may actually give you an introduction to the topic with her. You won't really be allowed to talk to any of her caregivers there because of confidentiality issues, but you can perhaps broach it with her as a transitional care issue. She may also have a social worker available through her hospital stay, which would be a good resource. This may help you strategize about whatever you discover through the council on aging.
Hugs.
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I've been trying to get in touch with my local council on aging for days now. No luck so far -- but I'm hoping that any day now I'll manage to catch them on like the five minutes per day when they're in the office and picking up the phone. I'm on my own till then, of course, but I think your point about the hospitalization being a good starting point is an excellent one. *hugs*