I watched a documentary on PBS tonight called “Mimi and Dona”. It is part of the Independent Lens documentary series.
The film follows Mimi, the elderly mother and care-giver of Dona, her intellectually-disabled adult daughter. Mimi can no longer care for Dona and must find her a new home.
I cried my way through this film. I had to explain to my kids that I was crying because this could have been the story of my Nana Grace and her sister Dorothy May, if circumstances had turned out differently.
Let me lay the background. My grandmother and her siblings, Freddie and Dorothy, were “orphaned” when their mother died in 1923. Grace was about 7 years old, Freddie was about 4, and Dorothy was about 1. Their father worked as a teamster in the oilfields of West Texas and was unable to care for them, so they were taken in first by their mother’s relatives, then by their father’s relatives, before finally ending up in the Reynolds Presbyterian Orphanage in Vickery, TX about 1925.
At the orphanage, they were separated: Grace went to the girls’ dormitory; Freddie, to the boys’ dormitory; and little Dorothy, who was sickly, to a babies’ home closer to the hospitals in Dallas.
Dorothy suffered an accident as a toddler that caused her to leak fluid from her ears and be “slow to learn”. My grandmother told me that Dorothy had fallen down an elevator shaft, about 1 floor, and that had damaged her brain. I have not been able to verify this.
Dorothy was placed in the care of the Texas mental health authorities at a very young age, living in the state home in Mexia for several years, then in group homes. Once my grandmother was married and settled in Houston in the 1940s, Dorothy began to make regular visits, traveling via bus from group homes. In the early 1970s, on her last visit, she didn’t want to go back to her group home, instead wanting to live with my grandmother. My grandmother requested that the group home limit Dorothy’s visits to her, as she felt they were disruptive to Dorothy’s well-being, and my grandmother was not financially or physically able to care for her permanently.
My grandmother’s brother Freddie was the family contact person for the state records. When he died in the mid-1970s, his widow told the state she wanted nothing to do with the decisions made about his sister Dorothy. She did not inform my grandmother of this, and when my grandmother contacted the group home to set up Dorothy’s next visit, she was informed that the family had requested no-contact, therefore no visits could be made. It was too late, according to the state, to regain access to Dorothy.
This situation haunted my grandmother for decades. Before Nana Grace died in 2006, she asked me to find out if her baby sister was even still alive.
I contacted the state mental health department and got quite the run-around, transfers to multiple departments and being told no one could help me due to privacy laws. In late 2007, nearly a year after my Nana died, an state employee (who shall remain anonymous) called and gave me a lead on Dorothy, that she might be in a nursing home in Athens.
In Spring 2008, My mother and I went to Athens and found the nursing home. Standing there in person, they confirmed that Dorothy May resided there. The staff told us that if we had called, they would not have been allowed to tell us anything, again due to privacy laws, and also because Dorothy was a ward of the state with a non-family guardian.
We were allowed to visit Aunt Dorothy. When we walked through the door of the dining room, Dorothy recognized my mother immediately, despite not having seen her in over 30 years. She thought that I was my Aunt Sydney (whom I greatly resemble), being unaware that Sydney had died in 1993. She thought that my 2 year old daughter was me, as that was the age I was when last she saw me. She was understandably upset to learn that her sister had died.
Dorothy had been waiting years for a visit from family. No one had ever told her why her family never came to see her – that the family didn’t even know where she lived.
She took us to her room and showed us the old family photos framed on her dresser. She told my mother that she was ready to go, she just needed to pack her suitcase. This broke our hearts, for she believed that the family had finally come to bring her home. My mother told her that she had to stay there, that we would come back to visit soon.
Mama had left her contact information for the state-appointed guardian, who contacted her and told her not to return without written approval, because her visit had been disruptive to Dorothy’s life. Although Mama requested another visit, the guardian did not approve it.
Sadly, Dorothy died in 2009, a few months after our visit.
If circumstances had turned out differently, this could have been story of “Grace and Dorothy”. My grandmother would have been the elderly care-giver of her adult intellectually-disabled sister. We would have been richer for Dorothy’s day-to-day presence in our lives.
If circumstances had been different.
