Another new car!” my dad says, shaking his head as I try to load him into the front seat and his wheelchair into the back, on our way to the ER after he’s fallen yet again. “Always a new car with you!”
It’s not a new car. It’s the same black Toyota Corolla with a ding in the fender and a crack in the windshield that I’ve been driving for years. But to my dad, 88 with advanced dementia, I guess every car is new.
New Orleans was a fun place for him to go to college — he has the best stories about his first Mardi Gras as a Tulane freshman back in 1956 — and to be an irreverent adult. From his late teens until his late 70s, my father soaked up everything this city had to offer, from drag shows to 2 a.m. concerts to indulgent dinners and four-hour liquor-soaked lunches. He had a costume of peacock feathers that he wore to multiple festive occasions; he never missed a MOMS Ball; he lived for years on Burgundy Street with a crazy cast of French Quarter characters. Along with his fourth wife, he’s depicted waving a tambourine on the 20th anniversary poster for Tipitina’s because he was such a fixture there.
But his peacock-feather-and-tambourine days are behind him now, and this city … it is not built for the elderly. The sidewalks outside of his Mid-City home are treacherous and cracked around gnarled oak roots, making it dangerous even for someone able-bodied to navigate. When his water started leaking, the Sewerage & Water Board hit him with a $7,000 bill and then shut his water off in the middle of the summer before he could even understand what was going on, and when they issue a boil order, he is never notified in time since he doesn’t have a cell phone to get alerts. Every summer, I have to worry that he won’t run his air conditioning because he doesn’t want to pay the increased power bill, and on top of all of that, his home is facing subsidence and termites. And of course the only reason I’m putting a bleeding 88-year-old into my beat-up Toyota in the first place instead of calling an ambulance is because … I called an ambulance more than an hour ago and it never arrived. The Big Easy does not always live up to its nickname, at least not for all of its citizens.
And that’s not even taking hurricane season into account, particularly the extra-scary months of August and September. No one wants to evacuate, obviously — I hate it so much I stayed for Ida, which in retrospect was a mistake. But the level of terror I feel about the possibility of evacuating with a medically fragile man who can get lost in his own living room cannot be described. Hurricane evacuation plans assume a person can follow directions, remember instructions, adapt to change, and stay calm under extreme stress. Dementia strips away every one of those abilities, and that’s before we even get started on his physical limitations. Evacuating with him is a nightmarish scenario that I just have to hope and pray won’t happen — I have a Nash Roberts prayer candle that I light every time a hurricane threatens the Gulf, and so far, it’s served me well. But how long will my luck hold out?
We celebrate New Orleans as a city where people live life to the fullest and become their truest selves. We revel in the music, the food, the festivals, the bright colors, the eccentricity. My father embraced all of it — he lived his best life here. But what happens when the people who danced until dawn can no longer make it safely to the corner?
At this point, and sadly more every day, my father has forgotten much of the city he loved. But I hate that the city seems to be forgetting people like him.
