Helping Mom leave her home for senior living

On Thanksgiving Day last year, my mom walked through the house she had lived in for over 52 years for the last time. This was the house she had raised her children in, practiced as a therapist in and lived with and loved my father in.

It was one of the hardest days of a challenging six months when, at the age of 86, Mom went from living independently to moving into independent living. Mom had already moved into her new apartment a few days before, but she insisted that she wanted to see the house one last time.

I knew from the moment we walked in it was a bad idea, but once we crossed the threshold there was no turning back. As she walked through the house, which was in disarray from the move, she started to cry quietly. As we progressed through each room, her quiet crying turned into a low wail. She had spent months preparing herself and choosing what she would leave behind and what she’d bring with her, but it didn’t matter in that moment of seeing it all again.

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Suddenly, everything she’d chosen to leave behind became incredibly important, from half-dead plants to books she hadn’t looked at in years. When we came to the dining room cabinets, full of silver-plated platters and china that hadn’t been given away or taken to her new apartment, I thought she’d be fine. I mean, she hadn’t entertained in that kind of way in years. Right?

Wrong. I had no idea the emotional toll this downsizing had already taken on her. I didn’t imagine her emotions about this huge transition would be expressed in an attachment to things she no longer needed, especially in senior living. Things like asparagus plates. Or escargot plates. Honestly, I’d never eaten an escargot off of an escargot plate in that house in my entire life. I’m certain in her new home (which has all meals provided anyway), she won’t need them. But suddenly, she absolutely had to have them.

At one point, still crying, she held up a little piece of crystal and said, “Pamela, you have to take these.” I had no idea what “these” were. Apparently, they are little bars to rest your forks and knives on so your tablecloth wouldn’t get dirty. Really.

To get her to stop crying, I told her I would take them. As she walked into the next room, I put them back into the cabinets.

My mother is an incredibly intelligent, strong and resilient person who has been remarkable in her widowhood. There had been much more difficult days for her, especially the day my dad died almost 13 year before, so I had no idea this day would be so hard for her.

In retrospect, I had a clue. The night my dad died, I remember my mother sitting in the living room, looking around at all the things they’d collected over the years and crying that he would never see them again. I remember thinking at the time: ‘Well, gee, Mom, he’s never going to see anything again, like his children and grandchildren.’ But for my mom and dad, “stuff” was so much more than just stuff. It represented their love, their accomplishments, their entire life together.

For the last 13 years, my mom had been living alone in that house. And for most of those years, she really did great. Building new friendships and continuing her love of all things cultural. Traveling around the world by herself (and, yes, even going on a cruise to Venice, Italy, with a blind-date traveling companion).

She even continued to see her therapy patients in her home office until 10 days before she moved.

But this past July, she fell down the stairs coming home from a wedding. She can’t remember much about it except she was kicking off her Jimmy Choo’s (yup, she is a fashion queen at 86), and the next thing she knew she was at the bottom of the stairs. Luckily, my sister was in the house when it happened. But Mom’s recovery was long and hard. Living in her two-story home wasn’t going to work any longer.

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My siblings and I helped her search for a new living arrangement. (Rochester was out, she said, because of the snow. “What snow?” I replied.) Eventually, we found a wonderful continuing-care senior facility 10 minutes from one of my brothers and close enough to my sister on Staten Island, where my mom lived.

That’s when the downsizing began. The new place was smaller, so we kept telling her, “You can’t take everything.” But each item was a battle. My siblings helped her clean out the house. I took multiple trips down to go through drawers and closets, which contained—and I’m not exaggerating—hundreds of pairs of gloves, purses, shoes and clothing she had collected over 50 years.

We encouraged Mom to hire a “senior move manager,” who had the daunting task of getting my mother to let go of at least 10 sets of china, five sets of silver, collections of demi-tasse cups, three KitchenAid and Cuisinart mixers. One gadget she just couldn’t leave behind was the seal-and-pack heating system for leftovers and at least 1,000 bags for the system. Actually, she brought two of the gadgets with her to the apartment, “just in case one of them breaks,” she explained. Never mind that she really never has to cook again.

That’s the thing. Her new living arrangement releases her from all that stuff into what is essentially Club Med living for seniors, with meals and activities provided every day. Of course, Mom didn’t realize this at first. To her, it was all about leaving things behind, not about the anticipation of where she was going.

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I know now such emotions are typical and to be expected. Jackie Belasco Stone, vice president of sales consulting with Varsity, a marketing firm specializing in senior living, confirmed it for me.

“Emotions are running high at this time,” she explained. “Adult children may be feeling guilty about convincing Mom to make a move, and everyone may be feeling sad and nostalgic about leaving the home where the family made so many precious memories.”

Mom’s new apartment is beautiful. It contains the best of what she and my dad collected and, frankly, that means it looks almost exactly like her house.

And now she’s too busy to spend any time in it. Every time I call her she’s out and about, doing puzzles, exercising and even quilting. That day she walked out of the house, she embraced her new life with gusto, just as she has taught me to do at every stage of my life.

I can’t say it was easy. Transformation never is. But I’ve learned much from watching what she went through.

Now, I find myself looking at all the stuff in my house—things I collected and things I brought from my mother’s house—and I know that none of it really matters in the end. This whole process has taught me the true meaning of, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” We come into this world with nothing and we go out of this world with nothing, and everything we collect along the way is just stuff.

For people like my mom, that stuff held great symbolic meaning. But that’s only because of the memories, love, legacy and values surrounding it. That’s the true measure of a life well-lived.