co-housing Archives - Fran Moreland Johns

November 8, 2009

Moving Mom and Dad

The folks are getting on in years, the old house needs work, the Stuff is piling up everywhere — it’s time to look at moving. But the big question is, where to? Urban condo? Assisted living? Retirement village? LifeCare facility? Co-housing? Maybe even the dreaded Nursing home or dementia facility?

Making the decision to move into what is likely the last residence on this side of the hereafter can be daunting, sometimes devastating. Whether it involves oneself or one’s older family members, the Final Move often exhausts patience, finances and family resources. But good choices are out there, and good help (sometimes free, more often adding to the growing costs of this life event) can be found. In previous posts this space has offered glimpses of these choices and experiences: Helping Mom Die (10/16); Hanging in the ‘Hood (9/29); Justice Souter’s Retirement Housing (8/10.) What follows is a look into the LifeCare option. I should first insert a grateful nod to the source of this headline, a great book by Sarah Morse and Donna Quinn Robbins.

I have just returned from a visit with my sister Helen and her husband, newly installed in a spacious two-bedroom cottage at Kendal at Ithaca (NY), a Continuing Care Retirement Community. To do this necessitated cleaning out and selling (of course, the sale fell through when everything was on the moving vans, but last-minute calamity is to be expected) the far more spacious four-bedroom plus roof deck 1920s condominium in Boston they have called home for nearly 40 years. It was not pretty. Despite my earlier Boston visits to whittle down the Stuff factor and later urgings to connect Helen with the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, the job tested the limits of patience and strength of their four extraordinarily loving children.

Nonetheless the deed did get done, and Kendal at Ithaca is perfect for Helen and Clare, thanks to a confluence of happy circumstances: their physician daughter has relocated from Seattle to Ithaca; Manhattan is a comfortable Cornell bus trip away; desired features are in place. KAI includes a community center with a dining room in which their monthly fees entitle them to one meal per day, a fitness center, a large library, a van to take residents to doctors’ appointments etc. Best of all, says Clare, who has Parkinson’s, “they can’t throw me out.” The major appeal of LifeCare, or Continuing Care communities, for many seniors, is the inclusion of facilities for different levels of care which one may require in the future. (Worst of all, Clare adds, is the fact that “we have a lot of Parkinson’s, so I see myself 3 years down the road… 6 years down the road.”)

Continuing Care communities do not come cheap. But for seniors who have a chunk of change from a home sale or other source and a comfortable retirement income, they fortunately exist in growing numbers across the country.

For my own part, and I am certainly very senior, I was suffering anxieties and depression after one day. I need regular infusions of 30-somethings and 40-somethings for basic survival. Again, from what I’ve heard about co-housing — the perfect choice for many others as they age — that arrangement would feel crowded and disorderly. But there is the growing aging-in-place “Village” movement, which many would not choose but seems perfect to me.

Thank heaven for choices. It is seldom too early for Boomers, or Beyonders, to start considering them — and while you’re at it, you may want to clean out the attic.

General interest

August 31, 2009

What to do about Mom?

by Fran Johns

My friend Joan is distressed about her mother. Joan – that’s an alias, we both value her privacy – lives quite near her parents, visits regularly, helps out with finances, health issues and everyday needs. They are in their late eighties. Other siblings live in other states. Until recently everything was fine; now the parents are in separate areas of their assisted living residence, Joan’s mother is in frequent despair and need. What’s a daughter to do?

This story is being repeated thousands of times every day across the country. Only this story has a peculiar twist: Joan’s parents did everything right. They lived frugally, planned ahead, raised their children to be successful and independent, moved early into a retirement community which offers care through illnesses minor and terminal. With Joan’s help they kept their affairs in order, including updated advance directives. (You don’t have your advance directives done? Horrors. Let me know and I will be at your door, cyberspacially speaking, to walk you through them immediately.) Joan’s parents were among early advocates for advance planning and end-of-life choice.

Joan comments: “Frankly, Mother is tired of being alive. She’s not depressed, just ‘finished’, especially as she sees these slow declines in her quality of life as a steady and inevitable progression. Her greatest desire would be to have a massive stroke and not survive. But then her greatest nightmare would be to have a stroke and live . . . Even with the best advanced directives reflecting her choices, that’s a fine line to navigate.”

The moral of this story is that no amount of planning and preparation can guarantee the kinds of last months and years we might want. My own mother died peacefully at home, followed 20 years later by my father, same story. But that was in 1967 and 1987, in the small town of Ashland, Virginia where they had lived since 1939. The town looked after them; their out-of-state daughters merely visited and counted their blessings. Towns and neighborhoods like Ashland are in diminishing supply.

But all is not gloom and doom; this writer is constitutionally unable to write doom and gloom. Joan is at least clear about her parents’ wishes, and her parents have good care plus all allowable precautions: DNR orders, POLST forms, understandings with their medical professionals. Most of these are possible for today’s Boomers and their Beyonder parents; if you can’t find them I’ll happily tell you how. Joan’s parents are also in housing of their choice. And those choices are many: co-housing, retirement communities, assisted living facilities, many of them available to middle and low income Americans. Anyone over 50 who thinks he or she should postpone considering all of these issues, documents and choices until next year is delusional. Essays re housing choices have appeared in earlier Boomers and Beyond posts; others will follow. The secondary moral of this story is that without planning, late years can quickly turn into hell for elderly parents and adult children alike.

What we don’t have, of course, is health care such as Joan’s parents still enjoy for others who need it. The thing is, we can.

Health/Money

July 27, 2009

Waterfront Condos: More on the housing dilemma

by Fran Johns

Waterfront esplanade, expansive views from a sunny terrace, walk to the ballpark — what’s not to love about this housing choice?

Downsizing from a large, Victorian house filled to overflowing with the accumulations of two very active lives, the Langleys of San Francisco decamped, a few months ago, to a new, easy-care, sun-filled two-bedroom condo in the city’s happening-place Mission Bay neighborhood. They love the convenience, the mix of ages and cultures, the freedom from old-house maintenance worries and some unexpected bonuses like new friends living on houseboats from another era who are within conversation range of their 4th floor deck. “We (the new condo development) block the view they used to have all those years,” Judy Langley says, “but there are a lot of trade-offs like getting the creek (which leads into San Francisco Bay) cleaned up, and the park over there…” For the newcomers, the young dog-walkers on the esplanade below, the middle-aged Chinese couple doing tai chi on the common lawn, it is an urban idyll.

Urban condos, even those without kayaks at the door and aged houseboats for neighbors, are an increasingly popular answer to the downsizing dilemma. But the dilemma remains huge and answers are seldom easy.

On the day the Langleys were hosting an Open House in their new digs, my sister was packing the last boxes from the high-ceilinged Boston condo that’s been her family’s home for decades. She and her husband are headed for a New York retirement community to which a physician daughter will also relocate from the west coast. Elsewhere this weekend a childhood friend was finalizing plans for a move from Northern Virginia to a coastal community where her husband will be able to live in a Memory Unit while she lives independently nearby.

These choices typify the variety of factors that go into contemporary downsizing decision-making: Is it affordable? Will I (or my parents) have the care that’s needed? Can life still be good (or even get better?)

And any of these families might also have considered co-housing. Yet another option for Boomers and Beyonders as well as for younger families and individuals, co-housing in some ways harkens back to a simpler, long-ago lifestyle and in other ways could only work in the 21st century. It was the topic of an OWL-sponsored panel discussion on Saturday, and will be tomorrow’s Boomers and Beyond topic.