WEST ST. PAUL, Minn. — At first, Jacqueline Hamilton says, she noticed little things.
Her father was driving slower or taking a longer time to turn. Then one night, on the way home from a Christmas party, he drove onto a walking path instead of the road.
"That was kind of the first red alert for me," Hamilton said in an interview.
Hamilton's father, James Stubbs, still loved to drive at 94 years old. It was a big part of his work life as a fabric salesman traveling all over Minnesota and the neighboring states and later as a shuttle bus driver. So Hamilton says it was painful to see his driving skills start to fade.
"He taught me how to take care of my cars," Hamilton said. "And he taught us the road. He just taught us everything. So doing this was very hard."
The number of older drivers on the road is climbing as Americans live and drive longer than ever before.
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States have a wide range of rules and policies designed to stop risky older drivers from renewing their licenses. Some require vision tests or more frequent visits to the department of motor vehicles to renew driver's licenses in person. In some places, doctors and police can, or must, report drivers they think are unsafe.
But adult children and relatives say that in practice, it often falls to them to make the hard decisions about the older drivers in their lives.
Hamilton agreed to share her family's story. So, she and her parents sat together for an interview in her living room in West St. Paul, Minn., a suburb of the Twin Cities not far from where she grew up.
After the pedestrian path incident, Hamilton says, she tried to convince her father that it was time to stop driving. He did not agree.
"Tell me, when have I made a mistake in driving?" he protested during the interview.
But Hamilton was still concerned, so she filed the paperwork with the Minnesota Department of Public Safety to formally request a driver's exam for her father. That meant he would have to pass some tests, including a cognitive test, to keep his license.
It did not go well.
"He couldn't remember the day, year, the day of the week were all wrong," Hamilton said.
Stubbs remembers taking the test, though he tells the story somewhat differently. "I said, 'This is ridiculous,'" Stubbs recalls, and says he didn't finish the test on purpose.
The state formally revoked Stubbs' driver's license. But he still had the physical plastic card, which didn't look like it had expired.
"He could see the date on that card," Hamilton said. "And he wasn't going to give me the keys. No. Way."
Hamilton wasn't sure what to do. And then an opportunity presented itself a few months ago, while her father was in the hospital and her mother was visiting.
"I happened to look in her purse, and I saw both sets of keys," Hamilton recalls. "That was a pivotal moment. I could take the keys. Or I could not take the keys. The hard part was, if I didn't take the keys, then anything that would happen after that point would be my fault. If they got into a car accident, it wouldn't be blood on their hands. It would be blood on mine."
NPR asked in an online callout for your experiences with aging relatives and driving. We got more than 100 responses, and many shared similar stories about taking matters into their own hands.
"We noticed the little dings, the scratches all over the car every time you go up and visit them. Like, wow, I don't remember seeing that last time," said Alan Cunningham in an interview.
Cunningham tried to talk his father into giving up driving in his mid-80s. But those conversations only succeeded in making his father angry. Next, Cunningham discussed the situation with his father's doctor, hoping he might help make the case. But that didn't work either.
Then it was time for his father to renew his driver's license. In Illinois, where Cunningham lives, that meant his father had to take a driving test behind the wheel. But to Cunningham's surprise, his father passed.
"It really comes back down to the family," Cunningham said. "Unless there's something obvious, it's really hard to get somebody else to do it. You're really stuck doing it yourself."
Finally Cunningham came up with his own solution to stop his father from driving. His parents kept their car keys in a rack near the door. So Cunningham replaced them.
"We just left some keys that did not work in the car, some old keys. He'd see them, and he'd think it was OK — at least he had the keys and he could leave if he needed to. But he never did. And so that's kind of how we got by the last couple of years," Cunningham said. "It's just a difficult situation, but you do the best you can."
It's not just children who mislead their parents. In response to our callout, some adult children described parents who claimed they had stopped driving — only for their children to find that the car moved inexplicably to a different place.
Older adults are often reluctant to give up driving because they're afraid of losing their mobility and independence.
"It's a very delicate subject — potentially explosive, certainly contentious," said David Condon, an eldercare consultant in Columbia, S.C., who helps families navigate senior living options.
"We hold so tightly to our notions of autonomy and independence," Condon said, "and that is what makes it such a difficult subject."
Spencer Price says he understands why his parents are reluctant to give up driving. Price lives in Sacramento, Calif., while his parents, both in their 80s, live in a nearby suburb where they depend on driving to get around.
"I have a tremendous amount of sympathy, especially because where they live, there is nowhere they can walk to get groceries, get food, have a social life with other people that are their same age," Price said in an interview. "It's freedom."
Still, Price is worried about his mother. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease two years ago. After that, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended her driver's license, Price says. But his mother fought to get her license reinstated by passing a written test and is driving again.
"It's scary, frankly. I don't like it. I don't like it for her. I don't like the risk of other people on the road," Price said.
Price and his sister have tried to convince their mother to give up driving. But he says those conversations get emotional quickly and end badly.
The emotional fallout from these situations can last a long time. Jacqueline Hamilton in Minnesota says her father is still mad at her for taking away his keys four months ago.
"When he gets angry, at one point, one phone call, he just says, 'I hate you.' And my response is, 'I love you.' And he said, 'I hate you,'" Hamilton recounts.
Caught in the middle of all this is Hamilton's mother, Jan Stubbs. Stubbs, 88, has given up driving herself, though she thinks her husband was still doing a good job.
"He was upset, and he still is," Stubbs said. "I was very comfortable with his driving, and I still would be today. But there are many points to consider. And it's not just the safety of the people in the car. It's a much bigger picture than that."
I asked Hamilton's father, James Stubbs, if he understood why his daughter felt she had to take away his keys.
"She felt like she had to," he replied. "She didn't have to."
Still, Hamilton says she would do it all again. And she knew that no one else was going to do it for her.
"I feel good about what I did," she said. "Hard as it is, I did the right thing."
Read part 1: With more older drivers on the road, states try to balance safety and mobility
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