Hope is a person. She is my frail mother-in-law, who just turned 70. Not so old, in today’s world of super-seniors, but Hope has severe mobility challenges that reach back to when she was an infant, born in a tiny mountain-side village in Greece, a place (at the time) that had yet to meet modern medicine.

Yesterday evening I received a frantic phone call from one of her four sisters, who lives nearby. Hope had fallen in the grocery store two days prior, was badly hurt, and refuses to see a doctor. Her forehead is badly bruised, as is her nose, and her left eye is swollen shut. “I don’t think she can live alone,” said her sister.

Her sister is right. My husband and I have been worried about Hope’s mobility for years. We’ve been worried about just this very scene, or worse, where she gets injured in a fall. (Under the worse scenerio, she falls in the middle of the busy four-lane street that separates her condo from the shopping center that includes said grocery.)

Last year I bought Hope a small walker, and tried to disguise it as a birthday gift. “If she just had a little support,” I thought, “I would feel better about her walking around on her own. Plus drivers and pedestrians might be more likely to help if they saw the walker.”

I knew she wouldn’t want the walker. She is fiercely independent — read “stubborn” — which likely has something to do with the fact that she was raised in terrible poverty in a war-torn country but managed to get to the U.S. as a young girl and make her way in a strange country, largely on her own.

So I asked my 9-year-old son, the apple of Hope’s eye, to give her the walker. Which he did. This caused her to pause for a minute or two before she turned it down. She said she didn’t need it, that she could move around better using two canes, and besides, she said, it didn’t fit in her condo. (Never mind that we specifically wanted her to use it outside her condo.)

My husband, who is traveling on business, called his mother immediately. She claimed she would go to the hospital, an easy promise to make to someone hundreds of miles away, on the far end of a phone line. But, he added, it wasn’t clear when, how, and where she would be going. Vagueness, after all, is one of her avoidance strategies.

So where from here? I welcome your ideas, advice, suggestions, and tips.

-Lori Woehrle