Daughter worries about Mom’s safety

Dear Carolyn: My mom’s in her late 50s, otherwise very intelligent, except she disregards basic safety advice that even a 5-year-old knows! She has a key under the front doormat, and ignores my advice to hide it in a better place (or, better yet, not leave one out at all). Worse, she’ll take the dog out for walks at night and leave the front door unlocked. Sometimes I’ll stop by the house and find the door unlocked and the windows open … and nobody home!

She says I’m “paranoid” and that “nothing will ever happen.” Daily, on the news, I see reports of older women being sexually assaulted or killed, with the attacker gaining access to their home through an unlocked door.

So, Carolyn, any advice? I know she’s an adult and can make her own choices, but I wish she’d make better ones. – Worried about my mom

The simplest precaution of all: Stop watching the news.

Older women aren’t succumbing in droves to violent intruders. It happens, of course, and it’s horrific when it does, but your mom has far more to fear from her car than from malevolent strangers.

Meanwhile, the chances your relationship with your mom, and your quality of life in general, will be hampered by violent crime are running at about 100 percent. Your preoccupation with uncommitted crimes is a dull ache that you already live with every day.

Your mother is fine, and she will be fine until she isn’t – and the same goes for her dog, for you, and for every other occupant of this mortal sphere. To lose someone is painful, and to lose someone to preventable causes acutely so. But that doesn’t justify writing a new definition of “preventable.” It means something you can stop from happening, and you can’t stop your mother from living as she chooses. Accept that, please, and enjoy her.