I was reading an interview with Richard Osman (find it here in either video or a transcript), who has written a series of mysteries called the Thursday Murder Club about people over 80 living in a retirement community and solving mysteries.
The books are read worldwide, translated into a number of languages. In talking about how societies treat their elders – and assuming that in the UK and the US we treat them badly – he said this:
But in Mediterranean countries, in Arabic countries, in China, elders are traditionally revered. Except every time I go to one of those places, people say, “Oh no, we’re exactly the same. We treat older people terribly.” And I’ll say, “No, you don’t, not really.” And they insist, “Yes, honestly, that’s why we love these books.”
And that resonated with me, because I know there are segments in our culture which supposedly revere elders and yet as someone who technically qualifies for elderhood, when I see the way those elders are treated, I find it condescending.
I like the idea of a book that treats so-called elders like people, so I put the first one on hold at my library.
But I have to say, I don’t want to live in a retirement village. I want to live around people of all ages.
Michelle Cottle, who did the interview, said living in a retirement village would be kind of like being back in college except without having to go to class. But having spent time visiting people living in such places, I don’t find that true. Part of that might be that as much as we complained about it, going to class was a major part of going to college and generated a lot of the ideas that made for good conversations with our friends.
I would like to live in community that had some of the aspects of college – my six weeks at Clarion West, living in a dorm with my fellow students, going to class, barely sleeping, were a high point in my life. But the students in our group ranged from their early twenties to their mid-fifties.
So I’m not planning to move into a retirement village or similar facility for old folks, at least not now. My partner and I are part of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative and we are trying to organize a multifamily co-op apartment building as part of that, one that would include a diverse group of people.
But there is another issue here, one I wrestle with. What if I develop a condition such as dementia or another severe illness or disability and need the kind of full-time care one gets in assisted living or nursing homes? I do not want my partner, assuming he is still able to do so, to spend all his time caring for my needs, and even though I’m putting money aside for my care in the future, I doubt I will have enough for 24-hour live-in aides.
The best assisted living and nursing care facilities are attached to retirement communities that cater to healthy seniors. You pay – pay a lot – to move in, and pay a lot per month, but if you become seriously ill or disabled, you can then move into the parts of the facility that provide the level of care you need. (These are generally called continuing care communities.)
Finding a good place for memory or nursing care when you are not part of that community is much more difficult and the waiting lists are often long. Plus the cost might well be prohibitive, especially given the current government cuts to Medicaid, which pays for a large percentage of nursing care since the average person cannot afford to pay thousands per month.
That’s not to mention that private equity is buying up nursing homes and even assisted living facilities, reducing (and underpaying) staff, and generally making them horrible places to live. And even kicking people out of them – people who can’t get out of bed on their own, people with dementia.
So there’s a balance we all need to think about as we get older. Yes, we want to be part of the larger community, consulted about what goes on it the world, doing work that we want to do whether it pays or not. On the other hand, we do have to be practical about the challenges of age. We are all going to die, and some of us will have some hard years before we do.
I mean, I’m hoping to go like my grandmother, who was still living in her own house, doing her own cooking and such. She’d stopped driving – my parents took her shopping and to the doctor – but she was still mentally active and competent to care for herself. And then one morning she didn’t wake up.
But I’ve watched other members of my family struggle with long term chronic illness, dementia, and a stroke that didn’t kill, but left them bedridden. There are no guarantees, no matter how healthy and practical your lifestyle.
Of course what I want is a network of well-run, government-funded assisted living and care homes that people can move to if necessary without having to make major advance plans and deposits of money.
There’s no reason we can’t have that, except that here in the United States we seem to be determined to make things that could be simple as over-complicated as possible on the off chance that we’re keeping someone, somewhere from getting something they don’t deserve. And mind you, that’s how it is when the country is more or less working as intended, which is, of course, not right now.
But we could have better systems. The barriers to them are political, not fundamental. It’s unlikely that they’d cost anymore than the chaotic mess we have now.
I’ve been reading a book by Rob Hopkins called How to Fall in Love With the Future: A Time Travelers Guide to Changing the World. It’s about visualizing the kind of world we want to live in, with a strong focus on climate change.
He does workshops in which people “travel” to a date in the future and come up with the specifics of what they see, hear, smell, taste, and otherwise experience, such as a neighborhood filled with trees and birds where people walk and bike to school and work.
I’m “traveling” to a future where we have neighborhood care homes for elders who cannot care for themselves, places where their friends and family can easily visit, where they can go outdoors, where there are plenty of caregivers who know what they’re doing.
And you don’t have to be on a waiting list or live in a retirement community to move in if you need that place.
We can do this. Sure, there are barriers, but we have to stop focusing on those and instead think about how to make the systems we need and want happen.
Be nice if we pull that off before I die.
This is a thing I’ve been thinking a lot about. My husband and I took a two-week trip this summer, visiting CCRCs (Continuing Care Residential Communities) with a very specific list of things we were looking for. Non-profit was top of the list, with longevity second. Infrastructure and planning (most of the staff I talked to looked bewildered when I asked about a facility’s plans for a future with water scarcity and energy scarcity… although two places did have plans, which nudged them closer to the top of the list). A lot of the places we saw seemed deliberately placed “out in nature,” which means you have to drive to town, or take a bus. Since neither my husband nor I are “nature people” (we’re not anti the Great Outdoors, but like the Little Mermaid, we want to be where the people are) those places, beautiful as several of them were, dropped down the list. So far, the place I’ve liked best had, among other things, an elementary school abutting the property; several times a year they open the gate between them, and welcome the kids in for holiday events and things like that. Like you, I don’t want to live in a monoculture of like-aged people.
On the other hand, dealing with my beloved aunt’s last years, I learned a good deal about how much there is to know about the medical and legal issues regarding eldercare. Every now and then in my extended community someone says “what we oughta do is pool our money and buy a town, so everyone can live in their own place, and we can have central meeting places, and and and…” But who’s going to run it? “Oh, we’ll run it ourselves! It’ll be a co-op!”
::shudder::
I can see a very involved group of residents on a “steering committee”.
The day to day running of this ElderVillage? Who will have the legal know-how and the medical know-how (and who will take care of the physical plant and file the taxes and fill out the compliance paperwork for eldercare).
We, as a society, seem to wish our elders well and hope they’ll go be well somewhere out of our sight. And I have all the sympathy in the world for people who are younger, have careers, maybe have kids, and don’t want or don’t have the bandwidth to deal with taking care of elderly family members. But one inescapable fact remains: if we’re lucky, we all get old. It would behoove us, as a country, as a culture, to build a future in which we’ll be happy to spend our declining years.
Yes to your last sentence.
One of the reasons why I like the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Co-op model so much is that it provides the kind of security you want — no one wants to be at the mercy of a landlord in old age — while also using having the place run by professionals. So residents have control — they’re owners and they have a say in how the whole co-op is running and particularly a say in their individual building — but they don’t have to do everything. This is a limited equity model, so residents who leave can take some money with them — unlike a rental situation — but not the kind of return they might get if the market stays nuts on selling a house or apartment, which keeps it affordable for the next person. And of course, in retirement communities, unless they are some form of co-op (a few are), you pay a lot in and get no financial return.
The problem with EB PREC is that it’s new and currently has only a few units of housing (though it also has Esther’s Orbit Room on 7th Street, which is being fixed up, and the Omni Commons on Shattuck, which is another place providing community gathering to do things). In twenty years or so I see EB PREC as having thousands of units of housing in the East Bay, but it’s not there yet. So to do what I want with it requires a lot of work on my part.
But it’s a better model than a freestanding co-op or co-housing community, not to mention owning a single family house or even being in a condo (since condos can vary enormously in how they are run — I know people our age who have ended up on all kinds of committees at their condo because the property needs some serious work and they want to make sure it’s done).
Like you, I want to live in the city in a walkable neighborhood. I love the country, but I do not want to be dependent on a car or on the kind of occasional bus service provided by most residential communities. And I don’t think it’s useful for old people to live too far from medical facilities.
Of course, the problem of what if I need nursing care when I get frail as well as old is not solved by this at all — one cannot expect one’s neighbors, even if they’re very close friends — to do that kind of care. Driving you to the store, sure; taking you to the bathroom, not so much. I’d like good living situations and good care homes to be separate and both easily available to people. That shouldn’t be so hard, and yet ….
Obviously I’m going to have to write more on this subject.