Mine turns 87 this year, and we forgot to stage The Intervention. Too bad, not that it would have worked.

She lives in a so-called “mobile home community” in Tucson. What that really means is single-wides and double-wides close together, baking in the sun below a mountain, an aluminum hive of isolation and prep for final staging. She decided she wanted to move from the home she’d occupied for 30 years and go live in a smaller place to makes things easier, which sounded dubious to me, but sure: buy another trailer, let me and my siblings clean up the old one with all the junk and get it sold while she’s still alive. Much tidier that way. Only she didn’t tell me the place she’d bought was furnished and even had all the kitchen equipment, glasses, and utensils! None of which she threw away…

What’s more, she had most of her own furniture brought over too. There must be hardly any room to turn around inside, and now she can’t even unpack her own kitchen things because a dead man’s plates are in the cupboard. Just another sign, as if I needed one.

I have a nearby brother who’s going through hell with this. For three days she lays there in here bed, depressed, and won’t get up, says she has trouble breathing. My brother tries to take her to the hospital, but she refuses to go. Then she calls him in the night and says she’s dying (can’t breathe), call 911. He does, they come, and she gets up out of bed to talk to them. They see she’s ambulatory and refuse to take her. This afternoon she calls to tell me she’s dying and that I have to come “take care of things.” She isn’t dead yet, though, just moving through the world without her mind and wants attention. She wants me there to clean the cupboards out, unpack her stuff, get tangled up in other people’s goods now, see lawyers, sign papers, put her old place on the block. But what she wants is out of sequence, and I see she isn’t really here much anymore. For all that, rational argument is a waste of time.

So now it’s come to this. Her way out, if this is what it is, will be a messy one. She refuses guidance, has no friends, and shreds your psyche if you try to help. My job is detachment and compassion. There’s a pretty 18-year-old girl from Middle River deep inside, red hair blowing in the wind. I’ve talked to her, too, in moments when the walls were down.

For now, I’m doing nothing. That’s all I can do until “something happens” and we step in to protect her. I’m certainly not going to Tucson, at least not yet.

(That way yields madness, and I’ve paid my dues already.)