Luella Hensley
/The Boston Herald
They were just kids three years ago. Raquel was 15 and Andrea barely 20 and if life wasn’t always as sweet as ribbon candy, it was sometimes.
Then came the accident.
It was November 3, 1995. Their mother, Luella Hensley was crossing a street in East Boston. “My mother’s friend, Mary, had already crossed, but my mother was waiting for the light,” Raquel explains. “She was like that. She always waited for the light.”
The driver of the car who ran the red light and ran her down and never stopped was Mary Kenney, a nurse, who left her victim sprawled on the street among groceries she was bringing home to her girls.
That night was the end of Raquel and Andrea’s youth. In an instant, they became mother to their mother.
Luella, just 50 and a widow with no family nearby, had a broken right leg, a collapsed lung and a fractured skull that left her in a coma for a month, in rehabilitation for five months, in a nursing home for a year and will keep her in a wheelchair for life. For three years, her daughters haven’t left her side. For weeks they slept in the hospital with her and for months they spent their days holding her hand.
Luella Hensley is paralyzed on her right side and can speak just three words, but her daughters say she understands everything. For a long time after she was hurt, she cried constantly. Now she seldom cries.
A beautiful woman, despite all she’s been through, she is meticulously dressed and groomed. Her daughters see to this. They take her of her. They color her hair. They put on her lipstick. They cook for her. They bring her her Bible and the National Geographic that she loves to read. They enrolled her in adult day care. She is their life.
“She would have done it for us,” Andrea says.
Andrea was engaged when her mother was injured. She postponed her wedding, then had a child, Cameron, 14 months ago. She wants to marry his father, but not now, not while there is so much stress in her life, not while her mother needs her.
She used to have a full-time job. Now she waitresses nights. She and her sister take turns waitressing. Andrea works one night. Raquel works the next. They have no social life because their mother can never be left alone.
Raquel was in high school when her mother got hurt. Somehow she finished school and got a job. But after her mother came home to live, she could no longer work full time.
They decided to bring her home and care of her themselves because she wasn’t thriving in the nursing home. “It was really, really hard to see her there. Everyone was so old and she isn’t old,” Andrea says. “I’d go in and she’d be wet. She took a seizure and they did nothing. We had to call the ambulance. We’d have the light on for hours before anyone came. She had money stolen from her. It was terrible.”
They moved from their second floor apartment, not just because they couldn’t afford it anymore, but because they needed a wheelchair accessible place. Now they live in Revere in subsidized housing with 8 inches of fetid water in their basement, water that came in one day and destroyed everything, including every picture they had of their mother well and their old lives.
They don’t volunteer this. They do not complain. They tell you how a home health aid comes twice a day and a nurse comes once every two weeks and how their mother is enrolled in adult day care, and that’s a help. Yes, they get up in the middle of the night to help her to the bathroom, and yes, they have to strip the bed and change her when she doesn’t make it, and yes, they’re in charge of her medicine and her doctors appointments and cooking and cleaning and no, they don’t get a break and yes, it is hard. “I never could have imagined how hard this would be,” Andrea says. “ I feel really old.”
Mary Kenney, who is the reason for all this, was sentenced to two years in jail Tuesday. The night of the accident, after she left Luella on the road to die, she drove to her Waltham home, parked her car a mile away, then withdrew $30,000 from her savings account the next day. She never went to the police. Her friends turned her in.
“Through the whole trial, she would never even look at me.” Andrea says.
The counterpoint of this continuing tragedy is that the Mary Kenneys of the world don’t ever look at the damage they’ve done.
