AGING IN PLACE: AGING IN PLACES

JULY 25, 2015 

Most of our ancestors grew old within the circle of their family, neighbors, friends and community.  Granny was often a fixture in her children’s homes, continuing to play a role in their lives and those of their grandkids.  Cook, babysitter, story teller, soother of a young child’s nighttime bad dreams.  When seniors living in extended family settings became less and less able manage independently, needing more support while able to provide less help, home care became overwhelming, often leaping from one crisis to the next.  A new variation to an old model began to emerge.   “Modern, tech-savvy, old age homes” staffed by paraprofessionals began to flourish.  Activities, recreation, socials, visiting artists and musicians, authors and newsmakers often provided an enriched experience. This allowed the aging generation to continue not only to sustain life, but to continue to participate, supported by paid staff, receiving visits from younger generations.  Safety, monitoring of health needs folded into musical, artistic and stimulating activities.  

Changes in health care research and treatment models fit this scenario well.  The elderly were living longer with the help of a growing body of medical knowledge and methodologies designed to support extended life spans.  So we began, many of us, to live considerably longer, with better preventive health care, new surgical, pharmaceutical and treatment options, allowing more of the “growing older crowd” to bypass the generic, medical-model of “old age homes.” In truth most were neither staffed enough to provide optimum healing, nor expected to bring their residents “back to independence”. 

One of the largest growing “businesses” in America has become the modified Nursing home, often named euphemistically “ Happy Harbors”, or “New Horizons”; “Heartlands” or “Sunshine Villages”: Places that are designed to allow you to “age in place”.  When designed and staffed well, they have become a valued alternative to living precariously alone in a multi-story home or confined to a “nursing home”.

Time and testing of models should help to frame a set of programs and policies that best meet changing needs.  Many reasonably healthy seniors push back against the idea of aging in “a strange place”; that will never be your home”. But if that place in fact becomes your home, encouraging maximum independence within a safe setting a new variation of our aging model can emerge.... I am calling it living in “safe” places.   So, I no longer live alone in a three story house, where a simple task of changing a light bulb may be the beginning of a downward slope toward broken bones, hospital care, adaptive devices such as walkers and crutches.  I live quite independently, cooking my meals, tidying up, driving on errands to shop, visit friends, eating in restaurants, enjoying movies and plays and concerts.  But if a light bulb goes out, I can call the maintenance staff member to change it. 

One way to look at this transition may be that while I was trying (and mostly succeeding) in aging in place, it feels empowering to continue that process by aging in different places:  an independent apartment setting in the summer, a more multi-aged condo apartment unit with no added services in the south for the winter.  For now, the balance is working.  For now, I am aging in many places, and beginning to feel centered and calm and balanced. 

recovery

to friends and followers:  Lots of "uppers" this week:  feeling well, with more energy than I can remember having for a long time.  loving my new downsized life style.  most important, starting to write again! here's the latest.  love comments.  

Recovery:  July 2015

The room grows quiet, the rustling of pages in our prayer book stilled

As we each rise and collect the threads of our prayer shawls around our fingers....

There is a stillness and quiet that settles us....we open ourselves up and invite into our sacred space the loved ones lost to illness, accident, old age..

I’ve changed over the past months, almost lost to a series of bacterial infections.

Memory, certainty of where I am within my space, within my life is slow to return.

I have to quiet those stray thoughts, quell the anxiety, let stillness fill the gaps, trusting that I will stay rooted in the moment, the place, the experience.

Many years ago while still in College, a few friends and I  would often engage in word play at our daily “commuter breakfasts”; I wrote the beginnings of a poem one day, or one of us did, and my memory of those words has suddenly returned:  “the mirror blinked blindly back at me this morning, containing not a me.” Not sure where it went from there, but it remains a teaser to me, especially now.

So I stop and look at my surroundings; furniture, books, paintings familiar but now inhabiting a new space.  I have “downsized”, moved a short distance from my old house into an apartment complex for those of us 55 and older.  I wake up most nights, knowing where I am, (no confusion here) but somehow certain that someone else is sharing the space with me; usually Ben, although sometimes I have been extra quiet so as not to awaken overnight guests; no one is present but me, yet it takes a few extra minutes to remember that I am the only one actually inhabiting the space; the others have most likely slipped into the tail end of a dream.