Tom Junod
THE LOVED ONES

FROM Esquire

IT WAS THE RIGHT DECISION. Of course it was. Mamaw was killing herself taking care of Papaw. Papaw was killing himself taking care of Mamaw. You were killing yourself taking care of them both. They were going to burn the house down if they kept living in it. They were going to kill themselves or someone else if they kept driving. They couldn't see. They couldn't hear. They couldn't always remember your name. They were speaking gibberish. They were staring out into space. They fell asleep in the middle of conversations. They either weren't taking their pills or they were taking too many. They were found wandering around. They were falling. They were in wheelchairs. They were immobilized. They were sick. They were old. It was—and these were the words you heard yourself saying, the words you heard everybody saying, everybody except them—time.

It couldn't have been an easy decision, no. That it was a decision, and that you had to make it, was in itself a terrible burden. That you were the one called upon to do the final arithmetic seemed cosmically unfair. Your life and theirs, in a ledger. Well, not just your life—your spouse's, your kids'. You had to think of them, too. Did money play a part? Sure it did. But more important was the question of quality of life. Theirs. Yours. You were being eaten alive… and so in the end you did what you thought best. You made the Decision.

MR. COBB, how are you doing?" I asked James Cobb, a lawyer in New Orleans, Louisiana.

"It depends on what you mean," Mr. Cobb answered. "If you mean how am I doing after losing my house and every fucking thing in it, and after being forced to live in a two-bedroom shithole with my wife and two kids and being told how lucky I am to get it, and after being fucked—and I mean absolutely fucked—by my insurance company and by the United States government (and by the way, just so you know, if anybody from New Orleans, Louisiana, tells you that they're not getting fucked by their insurance company and by the United States government, they're fucking lying, all right?)…if you mean, how am I doing after all that is factored in: Well, I guess the answer is that I'm doing fine. Now, how can I help you?"

Jim Cobb and I had never spoken before. These were the first words he spoke after my initial greeting. I was calling him because he represented—and represents—Sal and Mabel Mangano, the couple who operated St. Rita's nursing home in St. Bernard Parish, just southeast of New Orleans. They had not evacuated their residents when Hurricane Katrina was making its way to Louisiana—they had not evacuated in the face of what was said to be a mandatory evacuation order—and when the levees failed and St. Bernard was inundated with ten feet of water, thirty-five helpless people died. No: drowned. No: drowned screaming for someone to save them, at least according to the initial press accounts. No: "drowned like rats," in the words of a prosecutor in the office of Louisiana attorney general Charles Foti, who was charging the Manganos with nearly three dozen counts of negligent homicide. Now they were notorious—icons of abandonment whose mug shots after their arrest personified more than just the prevailing stereotype of unscrupulous nursing-home owners. An entire American city had been left to die, and sixty-five-year-old Sal and sixty-two-year-old Mabel Mangano had somehow become the public faces of a national disgrace.

I was calling Jim Cobb to talk to him about the decision the Manganos had made but also about something else, something at once more universal and more personal: the Decision. My own parents are elderly. I have not made the Decision, but there is not a day when I don't think about it and dread it, and in this I am not so different from many of my friends and millions of people from my generation. The horror of St. Rita's was a nightmarish realization of my dread, a brutal rejoinder to the hopeful voice that inoculates children from the emotional consequences of institutionalizing their parents: It's for the best. This was not for the best, nor could it ever be rationalized as such. This was tragic theater catching up with a social and moral issue that had already caught up with America, and in the aftermath of Katrina, I was haunted by reports that the St. Rita's staff had tied residents to their beds and left them to face the rising waters alone. I was transfixed by Jefferson Parish president Aaron Broussard breaking into tears when he said that the mother of one of his employees had telephoned for help from St. Rita's for five days and had died when no help came. I was even fascinated by the multiple rage-gasms of CNN's Nancy Grace, who brought herself off by urging the government to redeem itself by bringing Sal and Mabel Mangano to justice. And when I later found out that little of what I had seen or heard about St. Rita's was actually, you know, true, I began to wonder whether the Manganos, who had made the wrong decision, were paying the psychic price for all the millions who had either made or were making the Decision and had to be assured that it was right.

I offered some of this to Jim Cobb. He responded helpfully, translating it into the ungoverned language of his poor dying city. "Yeah," he said, "people need to look in the mirror. I've done a lot of nursing-home work. When a nursing home gets sued, it's because a resident died. And then the kids become avenging angels for Mamaw and Papaw. Well, where were you when Mamaw and Papaw were shitting all over themselves and we were cleaning up? You weren't avenging angels then. You want to talk about Sal and Mabel? Let's talk about Sal and Mabel. They cared as much as you did. They were wiping Mamaw and Papaw's ass while you were driving to Destin."

TAKE CARE OF THE OLD PEOPLE. It's what people are supposed to do in that part of the world. It's what they learn to do when the storms come. And this time, the storm that was coming was supposed to be major, was supposed to be the one that could bring on the deluge that everyone feared. So Steve Gallodoro and his brother and his sister decided to evacuate their father, Tufanio. They decided to put him in a car and get him the hell out of St. Bernard Parish, which is low-lying and vulnerable to storms. It was Cheryl this time: She was the one who decided to take it on, since Steve himself was a fireman in St. Bernard and had to be around in the event of an emergency. "They were headed to Tennessee," Steve Gallodoro says. "Sixteen hours later, they were in Jackson, Mississippi, and my dad could physically go no farther. He could no longer sit up in the car. They were rescued by a man who saw them at a gas station and said, You look like you need help, we have a big house, you can stay. And so they stayed with him. We refer to him as an angel."

That was 2004. That was Hurricane Ivan, and though it was indeed major, it spent most of its force in the Florida Panhandle and brought damage, but not deluge, to Louisiana. It was, however, decisive in its way: It brought the Gallodoros to the Decision. "My father was eighty-two years old," Steve Gallodoro says. "He had a couple of strokes, he was paralyzed on the left side, he was confined to a wheelchair. We were physically unable to care for him anymore. We tried the sitters, the aides, but it was too much." Fortunately there were four nursing homes in St. Bernard Parish, and one, St. Rita's was just six or seven minutes away from where Tufanio Gallodoro's three children lived. It had been in business for twenty years and was a family operation, run by Sal and Mabel Mangano, whose own home was on the twenty-acre property, next door to the homes of their daughter Tammy and their son, Sal Jr., known as "Little Sal," and his wife, TJ. The Manganos, all of them, were in St. Rita's not just every day but night and day. Sal was known for eating breakfast with the St. Rita's residents and Little Sal for being in the building as late as midnight, fixing what needed to be fixed. One of the things Little Sal would say to families shopping for nursing homes—and says even now, as a piece of advice—was this: "Find one that's family run, because if something goes wrong, you know who to point your finger at."

Tufanio Gallodoro became a resident of St. Rita's almost a year before the next storm season. According to Steve Gallodoro, there was still some "emotional upset" in his family about putting Tufanio in a nursing home, but that was eased by the proximity of the place and by its policy of keeping its doors open to family members long after most other nursing homes locked up. "He was visited every day," Steve Gallodoro says. "We would come by and shave him. We would wash his hair. We would give him a haircut. We would feed him." Besides, Tufanio's nickname was TJ, just like Little Sal's wife. He liked TJ, who, during the birthday party the Manganos threw each month for their residents, would dance with the men and sometimes dance on the tables. TJ liked Tufanio, too, and that's the way it was, Little Sal says: "I used to tell families who were leaving a loved one there, 'You're not the only ones who have the right to love them. We have the right to love them, too.'"

"HEY, YOU UGLY BITCH!" Jim Cobb shouts through the open window of his big green BMW. He's driving down one of the alleylike streets in the business district of New Orleans, on his way to what's left of his home, and he's spotted a former client on the sidewalk, a tall black guy who's wearing a sheer black jersey and a black skullcap, white iPod plugs in his ears. He's got that New Orleans thing about him, the spindly hard glamour, the high cheekbones, the Asiatic cast to his eyes.

"Hey, bitch, I saw you on CNN defending those people," the client says. "You gon' to to hell for that shit."

"Fuck you, bitch," Cobb cackles, and closes the window before heading out to where his city is no more.

Copyright © 2006 by Allison Hoover Bartlett.