The Hillendale House: Moving Out Mother

For the first time in our lives our mother’s house on Hillendale Drive is dirty. She’s been on a walker for years and can’t bend at the hip but still won’t allow my sisters and me to bring someone in. We do it anyway.

There are four daughters. I was born first, then Nina who’s eighteen months younger. And then fifteen years later, Gianna was born, and then eighteen months later, Gigi came along. The two sets of sisters are almost a generation apart. I live in New Orleans, and Gianna and Gigi are in Mandeville and Jackson, Mississippi, an easy enough drive to and from Hopedale. Nina moved to California after college.

Gigi hires a senior-care company, and they send a woman named Crystal over to do light cleaning, take Mom to run errands because the car is now off-limits. One day Mom talks Crystal into letting her drive—“just to get a brake inspection sticker”—and she takes the woman on a joyride, running stop signs, speeding, and side-tripping over to Walmart for strawberry muscle milk, red-leaf lettuce, English table water crackers. Crystal reports that she begged our mother the whole time to stop the car, but our mother just laughed, meanly. “I have insurance,” our mother said, when we say she could’ve hurt or killed someone. Our mother threatens to call the police if Crystal shows up again. “Stay out of my way,” she tells us. Crystal quits.

Our mother is seventy-eight and she’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles choke her neurons, while atrophy shrinks her frontal lobe. My sisters and I haven’t had this much contact with her since we were teenagers. We left home for college and hardly ever went back. Our mother has been fine with seeing us on holidays, at our kids’ first holy communions and graduations. But with this diagnosis there’s been more contact, which makes my sisters and me antsy, and which our mother considers intrusive. She needs someone with her at doctors’ appointments to remember what’s said. On the last visit, her internist told our mother she could no longer drive, and that she needed to move into assisted living. He said, “It’s not if but when she falls.”

My sister Gianna makes an emergency trip to Hopedale to secure the car keys—both sets!—but they are in a faded khaki canvas purse our mother hangs from her neck. Gianna puts her in the car to run an errand, and in the driveway, while our mother painstakingly exits the passenger seat, grabbing the handgrip above her, reaching for the door frame, Gianna locks the Club to the steering wheel. Our duped mother glares at Gianna, burning her with silence, then goes into the house without saying goodbye.

Smoothie

We daughters decide on the Carrington. We bring our mother to see it and the visit is a success. She looks safer already walking through these public halls. She signs a one-year lease for

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

a studio apartment. And then she goes home and reads the brochure and changes her mind. “Didn’t you notice the décor?” she says. “It’s tacky. The room you girls talked me into is a prison cell. I called them and canceled the lease.” She says she will sue us to get her life back. She’s been building a case, phoning long-ago friends, and reuniting with her gambler brother, Raymond, who’s in assisted living himself and urging her to move back home to Detroit. She was a child prodigy, a violinist, and she left there when she was fifteen to attend a conservatory in Philadelphia. She never went home again.

“Detroit?” we ask. “Go for it.”

“No one I talk to believes I have dementia,” she says. “Except for you.”

“It’s like she thinks we wished this disease on her,” Nina says later.

“And on ourselves?” Gigi...