Our Aging Plan? No Plan
Nick and Annie have moved to a continuing care retirement community. Bob and Alicia are on the waiting list of another retirement home. Joyce has moved closer to kids and grandkids in Colorado. Louisa and Teddy, who are on several waiting lists for continuing care places, have moved into a 55+ community. A number of other couples we know have downsized to homes or townhomes or apartments with just one level, no steps and no maintenance obligations.
Our plan? Our plan is that we don’t have any plan.
We know we probably should. We know there will come a time—maybe not that far away—when we can no longer get up all the steps to our bathroom and to the shower in our bathroom. We know there will come a time when we may not be able to drive, and living in a residential area, how are we going to get to the supermarket then? We know we’re already at the time when mowing the lawn and picking up fallen branches and getting rotted siding replaced is not how we want to spend our time or our money.
But why haven’t we actually done anything about all that?
Sure, we’ve talked vaguely about looking at no-maintenance condos and maybe moving closer to where we can walk to things and not be car-dependent. We’ve gingerly explored the idea of getting on a waiting list for one of the local continuing care retirement communities, where you enter as healthy and they take care of you as you deteriorate. But we found that where we live, the waiting lists for these places are 10 years and more and are, clearly, something we should have done 10 years ago or more. It’s too late now.
And when we do think about downsizing, we know that to do it, we have to start now. We have to start by going through stuff and getting rid of what wouldn’t fit into a smaller living space. But the progress, to be sure, has been very, very slow.
We spend too long debating which flower vases to keep and which ones can go. We debate almost endlessly, boringly, if we should still hold on to European guidebooks published in the 1970s. Should we finally clear out the closet in our daughter’s old bedroom, the one she left 14 years ago? But what about her third-grade drawings and those adorable stuffed animals?
So, maybe we’re not quite ready to downsize.
We talk, instead, of that ubiquitous goal so many of us have: aging in place. That means we talk of the possibility of maybe retrofitting our house—if one day we can’t make it up the indoor stairs, perhaps we could get one of those gliders that would slowly, smoothly, take us upstairs and downstairs? Or perhaps we could get a contractor to re-do the downstairs bathroom and put a shower there. How expensive could that be? And what do we do about the outdoor steps?
But to be honest, we really don’t talk that much about what should we do or what can we do or what do we have to do. We have, we think, more pressing matters to attend to—like the problem with our stove burner or the need to replace the gutter guards or figuring out reservations for our upcoming European trip.
Maybe everybody else is making plans or has figured out how they will deal with coming infirmity, both physical and mental. Not us. We apparently will still go on hoping that somehow tomorrow will be just like today. At least that’s our plan.