I literally just finished my piece titled Getting Too Damn Hard about the changes imminent to the American home ownership dream. Aging and the path forward is on my mind, as it is to varying degrees with almost everyone I know and encounter. I have a hard time taking it too seriously when a 30-year old Stretch-U kinesiologist tugging at my edema-prone ankle talks about the woes of getting older, but others more of my vintage I listen to quite carefully. Yesterday I got an email notice from an old friend and colleague who is eight years my senior. It said he was moving out of his Myrtle Beach oceanfront home and moving into an apartment in nearby Charleston. Rajan was my ops/tech guy for many years and in many iterations (Bankers Trust, a buyout/rollup initiative and then Bear Stearns), and we became quite friendly. I remember him being in my 40th birthday ski party of ten, when we went up to go Snowcat skiing in the High Uinta Mountains of Utah. Powder skiing in the wilderness, where comfort zones are left way behind, is as much a bonding experience as I’ve ever had. Rajan and I are friends. I once accidentally even told a very inappropriate joke at his expense. We were again in Utah, but that time doing an offsite meeting at my expansive ranch house. The meeting was winding down and people were intermittently leaving the meeting early to catch cabs to the airport as needed. When Rajan got up to go, I, as the meeting manager, said, “This is starting to get like one-little, two-little Indians…”. Rajan is rather diminutive in stature and he does, indeed, hail from the subcontinent of India. We got past that moment and now Rajan is once again leading the movement in a new direction.
I called to ask what was up with that. He reminded me that he is 78 and one-half years old. He and his wife, Summan, had decided that when he reached the age of 80, they would move into a local Life Plan Community. Apparently, a new built unit was available where they wanted to be, so they took the plunge eighteen months early. He explained that the Life Plan Community solution to their aging needs was less about existing conditions (he and Summan are in fine health he says) and more about the experience they had had caring in their home for his aged parents. His description of those hardships combined with the fact that that neither of their sons lived locally, made the decision one they thought was best for all. I did not dwell on the topic too much longer for fear of appearing judgmental, but if he could have seen my twisted facial expression he would have known my feeling about such options.
I have other friends who I will not mention by name but who read this blog occasionally and who are determined to go the same route towards a Life Plan Community. They have different circumstances but are also trudging upward into their 70’s. They came to the Life Plan Community notion because one of them has had big medical issues in the past which implied a need for more attentive medical services in their game plan. They have already balked once at the move and instead kept their large home going and open for visits from their extended family, but the Life Plan Community remains on their critical path forward they say. Both their reasoning and that of my friends Rajan and Summan, though different, are very understandable and seemingly justified. But neither Kim nor I currently have any debilitating medical issues, nor have either of us had parents that have gone into such places or burdened us with their living arrangements. That makes Kim and I on the same page that we cannot see ourselves taking that path. I think we both recognize that anything can happen and that might change or even grow to be a regret that we weren’t more prescient and cautious, but for now we are on a different path.
We also see friends and family that are starting to struggle with the burdens of home ownership, and that makes us be sure to do some anticipatory path planning that eventually moves us out of the big house with all its property requirements. I quite regularly think about and even do light research on nearby condo and apartment complexes, pondering what would make us happy when we are ready to move away from our hilltop. That is a harder task than I had imagined. To begin with, we are transplants out here. We have friends and family out here, but with regard to the family, our siblings are all older than us by as much as 12 years, so they will logically be on their own paths that are ahead of ours and that fulfill their own needs. In other words, we cannot plan on where they will be when our path time gets wherever it leads. As for friends, we have a mix of older friends and younger ones, so who knows where that will all be at the time. Our kids are now further flung and spread widely all across the country in New York, Delaware, Colorado and Southern California. We have less of a locus of family than we used to. Neither Kim with Wabash, nor I with Ithaca see those places as our next or last stop at this point. I’m sure Rajan and Summan did not have Charleston on their map, but that is what has come to make sense for them and I suspect we will come to a similar conclusion somewhere in San Diego County. Where else would we go?
Yesterday, after the call with Rajan and mentioning that conversation to Kim, we were at the LaJolla Playhouse for a show called Your Local Theater Presents… It is a show about the life paths of troupe of actors who are cast every year in the same play (Dicken’s A Christmas Carol). The idea of how aging performers deal with their decisions to give up their dreams and live their lives is a theme that Kim and I have talked about a great deal and even tried writing about (unfortunately to no avail). The play struck home, especially for Kim, in many ways, but it also got me thinking even more about Life Plan. As luck would have it, the inside cover of the playbill had a full-page ad for a San Diego Life Plan Community. What are the odds of that? I guess the universe wanted me to continue my research. So, I went online while waiting in the theater and as Kim went to the Ladies Room. I looked at floorplans, glanced at financial arrangements and even considered the services while watching a few testimonials from energetic community inhabitants. These people looked no older than us and were certainly all very committed to an active communal lifestyle with lots of friends to play pickleball with. While the physical units seem perfectly acceptable to me and seem like a physical space I could be happy living in, the whole community sing-a-long aspect makes me cringe. Do I feel the desire to be a part of an active older adult community? Do I want the convenience of an onsite medical unit that can just absorb my needs and my veritable existence at the first sniffle? Certainly not when I explain it to myself that way. The truth is that our thoughts and needs are hard to overthink in advance. The best course seems to be to keep an open mind and continually assess what seems like the best path for us at the moment. The only problem now is that the Life Plan Community people have my name and contact information. They will be relentlessly driving me to the conclusion they think I need and that fulfills their monthly quotas. Ah well, it is reassuring on some level that this is nothing more than an ongoing saga.