Missing LaToya
but not the circumstances that brought us together.
One night in 2020, when the protests erupted in New York City because of George Floyd’s murder, I texted my mother’s former home health aide to acknowledge the psychic load she must be carrying on top of living in the eye of the pandemic.
My mother had died a few weeks before in her memory care residence on Long Island, and LaToya and I still texted from time to time, though it had been a year since she’d split her time between caring for my mom and caring for her own.
She responded, unsure at first if I meant the George Floyd fallout. But then her texts arrived a few words at a time. Haltingly, she admitted her fears—especially for her nephews—and how there was no recourse, no one to call, and no safety net anywhere should she need the police. And then, when it felt like the whole country couldn’t sleep, she texted me at 2 a.m., venting and apologizing for venting.
I was up, however, and it felt good to be trusted like that, especially that night. As I stared at The New York Times app from my bed in Vermont, reading live updates on the city where I’d grown up about the confrontations between the police and protesters, I felt powerless to do anything but text with LaToya.
I sent her flowers the next morning. I knew my mother would have approved. At least Version 1.0 (as my brother coined her), the Mimi not yet lost to dementia, the Mom who was recovering from a hip replacement and who had so badly wanted me to meet LaToya, and knew we’d click. The Mom who planned to take LaToya to look at art at the Frick once she’d recovered enough.
But she never did recover enough.
LaToya lives in lower Manhattan, where she has worked as her mother’s sole caregiver since she stopped working for my mother in 2019. LaToya had taken up this vocation when it became clear her mother would need her. Even in the early days of knowing LaToya, I was aware she lived with her mom. Sometimes, LaToya would cancel a shift with my mom because hers was sick or in the hospital. Then, in the fall of 2019, she texted me to say we now had something in common. She’d become her mom’s healthcare proxy, just like I was with my mom.
Her mother, she explained, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
My heart sank. It had been months since she’d seen my mother. I was texting with her from the city, from my mother’s loft in SoHo, where I was staying while visiting Mom at her memory care place on Long Island. Flooding forward came all that LaToya had been through with my mother’s dementia. It felt brutally unfair that her mother would now follow the same path. She’d been completely worn out caring for my mom. Over text, she acknowledged she’d burnt her candle at both ends.
Then, during the COVID lockdown, I learned LaToya had lost an aunt to the pandemic. Her mother’s sister-in-law had died alone in a hospital in Atlanta. I sent her chocolates, a card of a painting by my mother, and a couple of cloth masks I’d sewn. She called me when she got the box, emotional, telling me she’d “ugly cried,” which made me stupidly happy.
Because it was almost embarrassing how much I missed LaToya.
Losing her when she stopped working for Mom was a turning point in my mother’s decline. LaToya had impeccable professional boundaries, was adamant about sticking to all the rules and trainings (which drove Mom wild), and would tell me everything I needed to know about my mother and her behavior. She’d even head off trouble, such as when she warned me my mother was withdrawing and hiding wads of cash around the loft. Mimi was never just a job to LaToya.
I saw that clearly one spring day in 2018 when LaToya came into the loft wearing her blue scrubs and a calm confidence that immediately brightened my mother. Mom had told me LaToya didn’t like to talk much about herself, but she’d learned she had family in Georgia. She said it in a way that conveyed pride in having a Black woman for a friend. She was proud that they’d met each other’s approval.
Entering the loft, LaToya had not yet put down her bag before Mom was boasting that they’d known from the first moment they’d locked eyes that they were perfect for each other. “Love at first sight,” she’d said.
“That’s right,” LaToya confirmed with something like matter-of-fact amusement.
Mom said it was as though they’d always known each other.
LaToya said she’d looked around the loft and loved what she saw: a kitchen that got used. A living space stuffed with my mother’s interests, paintings, books, herbs, and her pet turtle.
They both loved to cook, Mom continued, explaining that LaToya was teaching her all kinds of new ways to use spices. LaToya hummed affirmatives.
And I wondered how long this could possibly last.
It wasn’t terrible that LaToya quit; that part was a relief to me because Mom had become so unbearable. She’d criticize LaToya’s every move and be unwilling to let her just go quiet to not engage with her barbs. Mom would tell me LaToya didn’t like this work anymore, that it was the wrong work for her, not her calling, and that she was sullen, not the companion she’d once been.
It was heartbreaking to listen to this marker of the progression of her disease but also the familiar devolution of all her passionate friendships. It was all too familiar from life with my mother. Still, dementia had rendered a devastating reduction sauce; boiled out was all that was kind and forgiving.
Eventually, I realized LaToya was hanging on with Mimi for the sake of me and my brother. We needed her, and she knew it. She didn’t want to let us down, and she told me so directly.
Horrified, I said she had to quit because my mom was only going to get worse. Mimi was exhausting all her caregivers and headed for a crash. I didn’t want LaToya on board for it. You have to take care of yourself, I told her.
Our text thread told the story of my mother’s decline and our story of agonizing about what to do. I thought it would be a record I’d have to plumb, but I’ve since learned text messages expire. Through it, I know I resisted telling LaToya what I felt most strongly: I loved her like a sister. Now I realize I felt that way partly because I’d had my half-sister with my father’s decline four years earlier. She’d lived with Dad, and we would often text each other. Dad did not have dementia, however. He’d become softer and kinder with age.
Listening to LaToya stick it out had been unbearable. My brother and I could not survive in the loft for even just a weekend. Mom was so agitated, demanding, and suspicious. If either of us visited alone, within a few hours, we’d be shaking with rage and a blood sugar crisis because there was no way to keep up with her and also take care of ourselves. Instead, we’d visit together, flying from opposite ends of the country, just to have someone available to run and get the takeout so we had a chance to eat. It feels crazy to look back on how this was necessary, but it was. Our mother was in a perpetual state of chaos, often with her cell phone service and Amazon account. Crises that returned within hours of our departure.
LaToya had become one of us, and I wanted to protect her.
Finally, one day in the spring of 2019, LaToya acknowledged that the loft had become an abusive environment. I could hear in her voice that it was. She sounded raw and angry like me.
Please don’t feel bad, I told her.
But without LaToya, a window to my mother closed. LaToya’s absence was a loss nearly as great as the moment I saw that Mom’s “cognitive deficits” had turned delusional and paranoid, the moment I saw we were headed into new territory without paths or markers. Losing LaToya swept this territory off the map. No one I knew, trusted, or could talk to was with my mother. For a time, no one was with her at all.
After my mother died, LaToya and I had a weird way of thinking of each other at the same moment. We’d text, often after a gap of weeks, and reply, “Oh, wow, I was just going to write you.”
She’d say it was a sign we were meant to know each other, that we were brought together for a reason. “I haven’t worked it all out yet,” she wrote, “what this is about.”
For me, our connection had to do with sharing my mother’s decline with someone who started as a stranger but had a very intimate role with my mother, loved her, and then suffered just like my brother and I did. Which is why I feel guilty that she is alone now caring for her mom. Shouldn’t I be making them chicken and dumplings after all of LaToya’s matzo ball soup? It’s also about feeling profoundly moved by our very different worlds coming together. And a deep sense of gratitude and empathy. None of this explains the psychic wormhole our texts traveled, however.
Before Mom passed, when I’d be in the city to visit, I’d suggest to LaToya that we get together for a meal. My treat, I’d text. But there was no way to pull it off; LaToya is with her mom 24/7. Still, I’d propose it, and we’d consider it and watch it come and go. I figured at least I’d put the idea out there, an image in our minds, an emoji on our thread, LaToya’s avatar in a drink glass (once I’d suggested drinks).
That was before George Floyd’s murder, before the pandemic, before time took up this warp speed, landing us somewhere new, cruel, and, in my case, motherless. Time seemed to make our friendship all the more tender and precarious, a little thing, an ember we’d both fan and blow to keep glowing.
Out of the blue, Mom called LaToya during her final days in the loft. She’d fired all her aides and was delusional and incontinent, but on the phone, she and LaToya reminisced, and Mom told her she thought she’d figured out, generally, where LaToya lived. She even told her she was looking out her window in that direction of the city (creepy, nosey, invasive Mom).
They spoke for over half an hour, and LaToya texted me afterward, checking in, concerned for Mom’s safety. I felt terrible explaining she’d hit the skids. We were like a family with a drug addict, I said, waiting to hear her admit she needed help.
My mother spent eleven days alone before “turning herself in,” as she put it, allowing me to send a private elder care manager to take her up to Weill Cornell (her final rescue fantasy, “the best hospital in the city!,” she declared). From there, we transferred her to the memory care place on Long Island. It was against her will. I had no choice, and I’ll never forgive myself for that betrayal.
Now, it’s going on five years since my mother died. And I’m sorry to feel the ember of LaToya’s friendship cooling. She’ll text me on Mom’s birthday. We’ll share a Kamala GIF. I sent her and her mom a tiny potted Christmas tree these last two years. But we no longer text and say, Wow, I was just thinking of you.
Yet on Long Island, during my mother’s last few weeks of life, when she’d not left her bed for many more, she told me she needed to get off the phone. She said she had big plans with LaToya that afternoon.
They were headed out to lunch.
I hung up, hoping they’d make it to the Frick, too.
Those paintings are such a crucial contrast to the sad story of decline— your mother in all her earlier vibrancy.
I know what you mean about the intimacy created with caregivers. It’s a cliche to say they are family members, and not quite accurate maybe, but there’s an undeniable intensity to those relationships. A sense of being in something dramatic and traumatic together— a witnessing, I guess. Thanks for prompting me to think about this more carefully.
Stunning paintings by your mother, Eliza. I particularly love the one titled A Shift In Perception.
I can see why your connection with LaToya was so significant.
A different situation, but after my single aunt had a devastating stroke in 2018, I got to know her friends, who were as dismayed as I was by her sudden loss of speech and mobility. She never recovered and I kept them updated with regular phone calls and met them when they visited her. I became really fond of some of them and after my aunt died in 2020, found myself missing them.