Lucy Rowan's Mother

Linda Blandford

Lucy Rowan's mother lives alone in Brooklyn. She has a one-roomed flat (rent: $125 a month) and her only income is her social security cheque for $196. Lucy's mother is 86; she has cataracts and arthritis. Until a few weeks ago she could still get about; she shopped, visited, went for walks. Her arthritis is so bad she can't move. Lucy would take her to live with her family but daughter Lisa would have to sleep on the sofa. Is that a fair long-term solution? Sister Bernice talked briefly of moving her into a nursing home. The fact that only 3 per cent of the city's elderly live in institutions tells all about its nursing homes.

So that was the situation last month. One day, on the way home, Lucy noticed a dramatic poster in the bus. It showed a mail box stuffed with letters. 'The lady in 3B is dying,' ran the headline, 'only her mailbox can save her.' There was a telephone number for something called Early Alert run by the city's Department for the Ageing.

Not expecting too much (making contact with officialdom often seems as easy as making contact with outer space), Lucy telephoned the number. Early Alert is a project specializing in stuffed mailboxes. However, a patient and understanding official gave Lucy a whole string of phone numbers to try and much encouraging information.

Lucy's mother, it seems, has not been getting all the benefits she is entitled to. Ninety-one per cent of New York's elderly base their income, as she does, on social security. Getting even that isn't easy.

Anyone retiring now who has worked consistently for the last forty quarters and has paid exactly the right contributions is entitled to a minimum of $107.90 a month. Since that's patently not enough to live on, there's Supplementary Security Income. Combining the two: a single person receives $248.65 a month unless he or she isn't entitled to social security, in which case, and for no discernible reason, the SSI income is only $228.65, the official poverty level in New York is $250 a month.

Of course there's Medicaid providing all manner of home help and paying medical bills. And food stamps and even welfare from the city, if there still isn't enough. Being entitled to all this is not the same as finding out how to get it. As the official put it: 'The trouble is that no one knows how the whole thing works.' Still Lucy felt encouraged that she could work her way through the red tape.

She rang the Brooklyn office of the Department for the Ageing. Indeed her mother should be getting more money, visitors to help her with 'household chores, money management, personal care, laundry, meal-planning, nutrition, shopping, seeing a doctor'.

Unfortunately she would have to be seen by a welfare worker to make an inventory of her health and worldly goods. Someone should be able to come and see her in a few weeks. But what about now? This was an emergency, Lucy explained. The official offered the telephone number of a private employment agency: household helps, $7 an hour, six hours daily minimum.

Lucy moved her mother into her apartment the next morning: daughter Lisa took to the sofa.

Despite cut-backs, the city does everything it can think of to help the old. It sets up centres and projects. Most of them disappear before people can find them. Others complain they can't find the shut in, isolated old to help. But every time bureaucracy comes up with another way to tackle one problem, it runs into yet another problem.

Early Alert is the perfect example. It's available to anyone over 65. This is the theory: nearly all the city's mail is delivered to boxes clustered together on the ground floor of each building (except for those that don't have boxes). Through a tie in with post offices, Early Alert arranges for the postman to put a red dot inside the relevant box to remind himself it belongs to an old person. If he notices a bulging wad of letters, the postman remembers and works out that something might be amiss.

Not surprisingly, only 11,000 people have registered so far with Early Alert. Most old people are afraid to. Breaking open mailboxes is so common that people don't want to alert criminals to their vulnerability. Besides not many old people get letters.

Undaunted, the Department for the Ageing came up with a brand new scheme. They opened a pilot Senior Citizens' Crime Prevention and Assistance Centre. Bearing in mind that 40 per cent of the inner city's elderly poor have been the victims of crime, the centre wanted to teach the other 60 per cent to protect themselves. It offered booklets with such tips as 'If awakened at night by an intruder, lie still'.

It would also help people after they have been mugged. Social workers will offer counseling to help post-mugging trauma and, on a more practical level, make the necessary telephone calls to get stolen ID cards replaced and to find emergency financial and housing help if necessary.

The problem? The office is on the sixth floor of an unguarded, almost deserted building in a rough street off Broadway. There is no elevator attendant. The Crime Prevention Centre always advises the elderly not to get into empty elevators.

Lucy Rowan discovered that to get help for her mother, she had to contact seven different agencies. Her mother has since died.

From Effective Reading, ed. Simon Greenall and Michael Swan, Peking University Press, 1993.