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These days, I keep thinking of the lyrics that the entertainer Jimmy Durante made famous when I was growing up. My first memory of a retirement community is decades ago, which long predates the TV anchor Joan Lunden’s A Place for Mom. My uncle Furth and his wife Jeanne moved into one of the earliest such homes, called Leisure World, near Laguna Beach in California. They had no children, but two toy poodles they’d nicknamed The Kids, and when they moved into their retirement home The Kids moved in with them.
During my one visit, I was overwhelmed, as I always was in California, by the lushness: the bougainvillea and other flowers that filled their modest grounds to bursting Their small garden looked like a tropical paradise. They were a set designer and an actress. They’d had several homes around the world, but this looked like any other normal home, filled with gorgeous flowers, tastefully assembled furniture and The Kids—nothing to suggest that this new move signaled a drastic reckoning with a new, possibly traumatic, last stage in their life journeys.
My uncle and aunt apparently loved their Leisure World home; they seemed to have made many friends among its residents. A couple of years later, however, Furth wrote to me that Jeanne had died after a short illness. He was a widower. I scarcely had time to write him my condolences, however. In a letter a few months later, he wrote that he had fallen in love with one of his and Jeanne’s widowed friends, and he’d remarried. Furth, his new bride, and The Kids lived in the same small home he had shared with Jeanne.
I wasn’t that surprised. Furth was said to bear a striking resemblance to Kirk Douglas, only shorter; it seemed only natural that he would be a desirable catch. In periodic letters, Furth wrote that he was continuing to enjoy both married life as well as Leisure World’s offerings of lectures, sports, and other programs for its inhabitants. I eventually received word that Furth’s second wife had also died, and sure enough, he was soon wed to yet another single woman at Leisure World.
My uncle’s happy, if unusual, experience was my first introduction to retirement homes. My second experience was what I recall of the reactions of two of my retired grade-school teachers back in Chicago. Word went around that they had moved into a different retirement community in California. The story was that the husband loved the classes and variety of other activities available to the residents and that he also enjoyed the people he was meeting. His wife, on the other hand, people heard, was miserable. “I can’t get used to not seeing any young people around,” she said.
Today, my own continually worsening arthritis often suggests that I might myself soon be a candidate for such a move. Yet my memories of these different responses to this type of living has made me hesitate.
Several friends have been far less uncertain. One long-divorced friend, who has no family to care for her should she become ill, let herself be convinced by her shrink to move out of her apartment in the center of Philadelphia to a community in the suburbs. No sooner did she do so than she began to have second thoughts. “I’m surrounded by people with walkers and wheelchairs!” I pointed out that I myself have used a walker for years, but she said, “You’re just one person!”
My Philadelphia friend had been used to going to lectures and concerts in the city where she lived on her own. Now, just getting back and forth to these familiar activities has become an ordeal. She has to be bused by the community from her new suburban dwelling or, as when she took her own car, she can get lost. Her shrink thinks this is a perfect argument for her living in the retirement community, but she is still coming to terms with her decision.
Another friend, whom I’ll call Liz, had until very recently suffered from a condition that if she’s not careful, caused her to suddenly blackout. The last time it happened, her three children stepped in.
“I can’t stand having my children run my life,” Liz told me. She chafed at what she termed her children’s `invasive’ behavior after they hired a nurse-type caretaker to spend the nights sitting up keeping watch over her from her living room couch. Liz also embarked on a search for the perfect retirement home, and soon told me she’d found one. It’s still being built, and she took a friend with her to see it. It has huge apartments, gorgeous views of the Hudson River, and every amenity one could wish for. But she’d no sooner put down a deposit to hold a stunning apartment when she heard there would only be three elevators in the complex. She demanded her money back. “I can’t stand living surrounded by people with failing memories who can’t remember where they’re going,” she said.
Another friend—I’ll call her Sarah—said she too had decided to move into a retirement apartment in a new building that wasn’t yet completed. She and her husband had been trying to sell their large home in Santa Fe and weren’t sure what their next step would be, when chance intervened. Close friends said they were leaving Santa Fe to move into a retirement home in Phoenix, Arizona and insisted that Sarah visit them there. Sarah made the trip and fell in love.
“This is a wonderful way of life,” Sarah told me. “It’s nice to have all this privacy in my apartment. But the moment I open my door into the hall, I see people. I know some of them. They sometimes remind me of a lecture or another activity I was interested in doing. Plus, there are a lot of really interesting people.
Meanwhile, my Philadelphia friend has told me that the promised activities in her facility never materialized. "They only show old movies which don't interest me and occasionally a bunch of lousy entertainers show up," she said. "So I mostly stay inside my apartment."
Liz currently hopes her newly-acquired pacemaker will keep her free from fainting and let her remain in her Manhattan doorman building. And my friend - I'll call her Susan - who recently fell in her own doorman New York building and broke her shoulder, is now thinking of keeping her nurse's aide on permanently to help with her own problem with migraine-related fainting spells. "It's the price you'll have to pay for remaining independent in your own home," Susan's busy adult children have been telling her.
Another woman I know recently moved into a retirement community in Boston. She said she was happily surprised to find many people she knew who were already living there.
I thought I’d be tempted too. I thought of summers at the Boston Pops, being back in the dorm-like atmosphere of college, but then I freaked out when I remembered the Jolly Ups, all of us trying to fix ourselves up for our dates, and I couldn’t imagine going through the same process now at my age. So for now, I fear I’m stuck. It’s not good to live alone, not healthy to eat your meals on the run, nibble chocolate or sardines and sometimes not much more. But I ‘d find it infinitely worse to sit down every night with people I may not even like, let alone try to eat food I may not have had to cook, but I may not even want to eat. All this is assuming I can afford it.
But some people say that here in New York, I’m silly to worry about it. “You’re living in a ready-made retirement community right in New York City,” one friend said. “You’ve got a doorman, who can help you in and out of doors. You’ve got the bus at your corner. You’ve got cabs, you’ve got Uber. You want ice cream—here it is; you can get anything delivered in this city. You want people? Go outside and you’re surrounded. Movies, delis, art exhibits, adult education classes—everything!”
I've taken added heart from a sobering account in The New York Times of some more than problematic retirement homes. In 2016, in one South Carolina retirement home, a 90-year old woman with dementia, who'd been about to be moved into a memory unit, wandered from her room in the middle of the night and disappeared. Human remains were found the next day scattered around a pond, and a ticking sound led searchers to recover her pacemaker from inside an alligator swimming in the water.
I take added heart at the words of a doctor I saw recently, “It’s not good!” he said, commiserating with me in a half-joking way about my feeling old at the age of eighty-five.
But at least for the time being, it’s not getting worse!
