In what proved to be only a passing spasm of concern, Dr. U. herself had in early 2006 brought my mother’s vulnerability—or more specifically, her endangerment in the “care” of my incompetent and irrational father—to the attention of county’s adult protection division. My hopes had soared. But the situation, abundantly bad and deteriorating by the day, just wasn’t bad enough by the county’s lights. “The case of neglect against the husband is inconclusive,” said the letter from the county (which my mother repeatedly phoned me to read aloud with confusion and anxiety, my father’s angry voice in the background).

Dr. U. seemed to take that as permission for her to stop caring. My despair grew.

In the end it took a crisis: My mother found half-dead by one of the aides who had valiantly kept going to the house. The mercury soaring, the a/c off, my mom on the floor pale and dizzy in urine-soaked clothes, her respiratory distress acute and her heartbeat erratic. My father with his hands in his pockets. The 911 call, the ambulance.

The call from a social worker at the hospital: “Sometimes, when our parents get older we may need to pay a little more attention to how they’re doing,” a disapproving male voice said to me after sharing the news that my mother in bad shape in the emergency room. “Right,” I said.

The county stepped up then, finally: If the husband tries to take her home, we will intervene. Wonderful hospital social workers entered the scene: They got it and they knew how to help. Eventually I got my mother into Haven Ponds Care Center for rest and rehab—a transitional month during which I worked with social workers there to hatch the plan that would get her out of her house for good.

But I didn’t wrest her away from the grasping and incompetent control of my father. My failure. My guilt.

“If you could have, you would have,” my grief counselor, Melody, said to me gently. “You managed to do a lot for your mother,” she reminded me. The specialist, the gerontologist, the pulmonary rehab, the battery of meds, the nebulizer, the best oxygen, the coolest walker, the home health aides, and the right insurance to pay for it all. “And you did get her out of the house and into assisted living. That was huge.”

“But my father went with her,” I said. My mother had blossomed during her time at the care center. She had liked being there on her own, had been happy. “I don’t want to leave here,” she told me the night before her move to the assisted living apartment, where my father was already seething among boxes and furniture left by the moving company. “I’m used to it here,” my mother went on. “And I like it. I’m the pet.”

I am haunted by this conversation. By having failed to make it possible for my mother to remain at Haven Ponds, on her own and happy. I wish I’d fought for it. Things do, of course, come into focus differently in hindsight. At the time, everything was complicated and highly charged: A blur of doctors and social workers, lots of meetings and machinations, my father on the scene as both a troublesome presence and a potentially serious obstacle, the county standing by to swoop in if my father tried to take my mother home, the overwhelming sense of urgency about coming up with a plan that would meet my mother’s needs and somehow work with or for or around my father.

The doctors and social workers said assisted-living was the right scenario for her; that became the focus. The chief concern was about whether my father would resist—more important, whether he would write out the checks for my mother’s move or whether I would have to take legal action to make that happen. When he signaled that he would, grudgingly, move with my mother to an assisted-living apartment, we cheered; it got us over the hump, surmounted what we’d feared would be a disastrous hurdle.

“And so I moved her back in with my father,” I said to Melody. “The night before she moved in, he was bellowing at her on the phone about how he was going to have to live in this horrible place because ‘you got sick’ and because ‘your daughter made us move here.’ He was abusive and ugly, and I remember being in tears with a social worker and saying, ‘This is a terrible mistake, how could we be moving my mother back into captivity with this man?’ And she said, ‘Well this is what we were able to do for now, and it isn’t ideal, but it’s better, and we can do something else down the road if this really doesn’t work out; we can move her.’ But I knew this had been our best, our only shot.”

“I think it’s true that you did what it was possible for you to do at the time,” Melody said.

I think that might be true, but it feels only ambiguously comforting. Maybe I just hadn’t been up to the task. Maybe my decision-making had been flawed, my judgment faulty, Maybe I’d been deficient of imagination or ingenuity or courage. Maybe I just hadn’t seen things clearly.

It feels like a crucial failing. Among many failings.

“If you could have, you would have,” Melody says more than once as I confess my litany of sins.

The biggest failings:
I couldn’t save her from the marriage she rued. I couldn’t spare her the wifedom and mothering that cost her everything. I couldn’t give her back her career. I couldn’t spare her from the suburb she disliked or restore her to the city blocks she’d adored. I couldn’t save her from the mentally ill son or from the sick younger daughter. I couldn’t spare her the premature death of her brother or the mother who lived too long. I couldn’t spare her my own daughterly disdain for her shortcomings or my resentment at all the ways she failed me.