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ALICE HOBSON HAD something very much like the same dread of leaving her home. It was the one place where she felt she belonged and remained in charge of her life. But after the incident with the men who had victimized her, it was apparent that she wasn’t safe living on her own anymore. My father-in-law organized a few visits to senior living residences for her. “She didn’t care for this process,” Jim said, but she reconciled herself to it. He was determined to find a place she would like and thrive in. But it was not to be. As I watched the aftermath, I gradually began to understand the reasons why—and they were reasons that bring into question our entire system of care for the dependent and debilitated.
Jim looked for a place that was within a reasonable driving distance for the family and within a price range she could afford with the proceeds of selling her house. He also wanted a community that offered a “continuum of care”—much like Orchard Cove, where I visited Felix and Bella—with apartments for independent living and a floor with the around-the-clock nursing capabilities that she might someday need. He came up with a variety of places for them to visit—nearer ones and farther ones, for-profit and not-for-profit.
The place Alice ultimately chose was a high-rise senior-living complex that I will call Longwood House, a nonprofit facility affiliated with the Episcopal Church. Some of her friends from church lived there. The drive to and from Jim’s home was barely ten minutes. The community was active and thriving. To Alice and the family, it had by far the greatest appeal.
“Most of the others were too commercial,” Jim said.
She moved in during the fall of 1992. Her one-bedroom independent-living apartment was more spacious than I’d expected. It had a full kitchen, enough room for her dining set, and plenty of light. My mother-in law, Nan, made sure it got a fresh coat of paint and arranged for a decorator Alice had used before to help place furniture and hang pictures.
“It means something when you can move in and see all your things in their own places—your own silver in your kitchen drawer,” Nan said.
But when I saw Alice a few weeks after her move, she didn’t seem at all happy or adjusted. Never one to complain, she didn’t say anything angry or sad or bitter, but she was withdrawn in a way I hadn’t seen before. She remained recognizably herself, but the light had gone out from behind her eyes.
At first I thought that this had to do with the loss of her car and the freedom that came with it. When she moved into Longwood House, she’d brought her Chevy Impala and fully intended to keep driving. But on her very first day there, when she went to take the car out for some errands, it was gone. She called the police and reported it stolen. An officer arrived, took a description, and promised an investigation. A while later, Jim arrived, and, on a hunch, looked in the Giant Food store parking lot next door. There it was. She had got confused and parked in the wrong lot without realizing it. Mortified, she gave up driving for good. In one day, she lost her car as well as her home.
But there seemed to be more to her sense of loss and unhappiness. She had a kitchen but stopped cooking. She took her meals in the Longwood House dining room with everyone else but ate little, lost weight, and didn’t seem to like having the company. She avoided organized group activities, even the ones she might have enjoyed—a sewing circle like the one she’d had at her church, a book group, gym and fitness classes, trips to the Kennedy Center. The community offered opportunities to organize activities of your own if you didn’t like what was on offer. But she stuck to herself. We thought she was depressed. Jim and Nan took her to see a doctor, who put her on medication. It didn’t help. Somewhere along the seven-mile drive between the house she’d given up on Greencastle Street and Longwood House, her life fundamentally changed in ways she did not want but could do nothing about.
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