Yesterday Bob and I were sitting in the backyard enjoying a glass of cheap white wine after work when we heard a loud BEEP BEEP BEEP coming from the street. We looked past the gate and saw a white and blue fire truck pulling into our neighbor’s yard. Again.

Bob set his wine glass down and hustled over to the neighbor’s house while I shooed our curious kids inside.

Ambulances, police cars and fire trucks are weekly visitors to my neighbor’s house, but they usually come during the daytime when only Bob is home to see them. The kids and I usually hear about it later. “P is in the hospital again,” Bob will say.

It falls to Bob to call her children, feed her dog, pick up her mail and help her into her house whenever she returns. This cycle has been going on for about a year now.

P is only in her sixties but her body is giving out from a combination of abuse, disease and neglect. Yesterday the EMS person told Bob the medication P is taking now is so heavy duty that she should not be living alone anymore. And yet, she is.

P’s children seem either paralyzed to act, or else they are moving at glacial speed. They say they are going to put her in an assisted living facility, but when? It seems they are playing a waiting game with their mother. It’s a game I will never play with my mother, and one I pray my children will never play with me.

As neighbors we cannot make the call to put P in a home. We cannot gather her things and say, “Don’t worry anymore. You’ll be taken care of. You’re going to be okay.”

I pray for my neighbor, feeling impotent. I’m glad to see the paramedics these days. Used to be when P went to the hospital, I’d pray that she could come home soon. Now I pray that she does not.