My daughter had already started looking at facilities when she told me I had to leave. She said the landlord had given her thirty days because having a live-in aide would violate the lease. I told her I’d go quietly. She had already given up her office, rearranged her entire life for fourteen months, and taken care of me without ever making me feel like a burden. I couldn’t stand the thought of becoming another problem she had to solve.
Then the woman who lived two doors down knocked on our door. She barely knew me, but she’d apparently heard my daughter talking about the lease. She asked to see it. My daughter hesitated before handing it over, and the woman read the relevant section twice. Then she asked a question that made my daughter go completely still.
“Where does it say that?”
My daughter pointed to the paragraph the landlord had referenced. The woman shook her head and said that wasn’t what it meant at all. She had worked in property management for years and told my daughter the landlord couldn’t simply force her to move me out based on that clause. Then she asked whether the landlord had given her anything in writing.
He hadn’t.
That evening, the woman came back with someone else — an attorney she’d called after reading the lease. They told my daughter not to move me anywhere until she’d received proper legal advice. My daughter sat at the kitchen table, staring at the brochure for the facility I’d left there, and finally admitted she’d never questioned the landlord because she’d been too scared of losing the apartment.
Then she looked at me and said, “Mom, you were never the problem. I was just too exhausted to realize someone had convinced me there wasn’t another option.”
