Double-Checking the Tough Choices Made for Laguna’s Gardening Icon
Hortense Miller is a Laguna Beach legend. She ensured her status in April 1976, when, as a mere sprite of 67, she deeded the garden next to her hillside Boat Canyon home to the city. Her terms were simple: the city would maintain it as a public garden and, to this day, you still can tour her property for free and, depending on the season, check out some of the more than 1,200 species of plants.
Her only other real stipulation on the paperwork she signed with the city was that she would live in the house until her death, at which time the city would take over the entire property. She and the city sealed the deal.
Lo and behold, Hortense Miller is now a couple months short of 98 and still alive. But she won’t live out her days at home. Last week, she was moved to a board-and-care facility.
The reasons, according to a couple of people familiar with the situation, would be familiar to anyone with an elderly parent judged to be losing both independence and mental faculties. They involve the cost of maintaining medical care and the quality of life awaiting the elderly person. These can be racking decisions, if only because we tend to think that growing old in one’s home is preferable to doing it in a group home.
In Miller’s case, of course, is the added element of her agreement with the city and her uncommonly generous gift that keeps on giving after all these years.
Miller has no heirs, and it seemed to me that someone should ask some questions about moving this local icon out of the home she’s lived in since 1959. I appointed myself, if for no other reason that I interviewed her in January 2002 and was delighted and touched both by her company and a book of essays she’d written for the “Friends of the Garden” newsletter.
Even on that day 4 1/2 years ago, she talked about aging. “My parents died at 73,” she said. “Both of them. I thought that’s when you’re supposed to die, when your mother dies, and I was all ready for it at 73. And here I am at 93, still mucking around.”
I described her then as sharp, witty and eclectic. Those characteristics had waned in the last few years, say those who saw her.
Marsha Bode, who manages the garden, says, “It was just getting to be too difficult for her to be in the house.” She had broken her hip a few years ago and had some other falls since then. In recent times, she’d required round-the-clock care.
It won’t shock baby boomers to know that kind of care is expensive. Miller was paying for it from her personal account, but those funds apparently are running out. Word is that she might have another couple years of funds left, and that home care is three times more expensive that a care facility.
The decision was made by Jo Hanna Sisson, a woman who has Miller’s power of attorney. I couldn’t reach her, but Bode and another person familiar with the situation say she made the correct decision. Both lauded Sisson for her efforts in assisting Miller in recent years.
“She was outliving her money,” Bode said. When I ask if Miller approved of the decision to leave her home, Bode said, “We talked to her; she was kind of fuzzy. She said OK, but she didn’t understand totally. She’s in and out.”
I asked if the inner circle had any qualms about the decision, and Bode said, “We were very sad about it, but we also realized it was the best care for her. Hortense would have liked us to kill her, but none of us would do that. She didn’t like not being able to do as much as when she was a younger person. She’d talk about ‘Nobody ought to live this long,’ but she still does kind of have the will to live.”
Those are no doubt familiar words to people with aging parents or spouses. Bode said Miller, who is from St. Louis, still was reading Missouri native Mark Twain’s novels “over and over” even as she hit 90. But she later began losing her sight, in addition to her sense of time and numbers.
Sharon McNair has her own geriatric care manager company and was hired three months ago to help Sisson. “She has been incredible,” McNair says of Sisson.
She says Sisson wouldn’t have authorized the move if Miller were still aware that she was living at home and were protesting being moved. Still, McNair says, Sisson also based her decision on what she believed would be more consistent care at prices that would extend Miller’s financial resources.
I asked her about the 1976 agreement with the city that Miller remain in her home until death. “That was the hope,” McNair said. “Then, you never know what reality brings. If she was aware of her surroundings and knew all the people coming to visit, I’d say she should have stayed in her home.”
McNair says her original intent is always to keep elderly people at home, if possible. But all the factors in Miller’s situation pointed to moving her, McNair said.
I ask how often she deals with these situations. “I see this stuff all the time,” she said, especially with spouses of people with Alzheimer’s.
McNair said she’s convinced Sisson’s decision “came totally from the heart. It was not an easy one for her to make.”
OK, Hortense. I asked the questions for you.
Maybe the city should have stepped in and guaranteed it would pick up your bills, if that’s what it took to keep you home. You know, if only to thank you. I suppose I could argue that, but not very strenuously. The city never signed on for that.
Having talked to her and read her essays, my ultimate wish wouldn’t have been that she die at home. It would be that she understood how much her gift and uniqueness were appreciated.
When I interviewed her in ‘02, I asked if there weren’t some “eternal truths” in her hillside garden. She laughed and didn’t offer any, but added, “But I think if you want to read eternal truths into things, this is a good place to do it.”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana
.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.
