It’s Never Too Late to Do Something Fabulous

Originally written in early 2017

As I write this, my dad is ninety-seven years old. He has always been a huge influence in my life, and I am incredibly close to him. As he says all too often, “Getting old is not for sissies.” Up until about eight years ago, he walked everywhere. Now, because of spinal stenosis, he is wheelchair-bound and needs help even to move. But his faculties are all there. He reads at least one book a week and will voice his opinions about anything from politics to what I might be wearing. My dad lives in his own home with help; these are good people and someone from my family sees him very often—multiple times a week if not more.

But I am sure that “new adventures” have kept my dad alive and looking forward. We have been lucky enough to welcome new babies into this world six times in the last three years. THAT has been huge, of course. He has been excited for each one. We have also planned events that he looks forward to. We make crazy birthday plans months out. We find a way to take him to restaurants he used to love twenty-five years ago—we just go very early. We find that creating something “new” to look forward to is very important to keep him engaged.

My dad and my mom lived in the same home for decades. It was a hassle to get there, especially with the great-grandbabies. It was close to an hour away in the car, and when we would arrive for a visit dragging the babies, my dad would often need to take a nap and wanted us to wait to visit until he took a rest. Now we were up to a multiple-hour visit, and that was just hard.

My dad expressed a couple of times that maybe he should move a little closer to us. I didn’t think he really meant it, but it got me thinking. I looked for a home in the town where two of my children lived and found one for sale that actually backed up to my son’s house and was a block from my daughter’s. I decided that I would just take a shot and buy it. I bought it in my name—and decorated it with nice furniture but not using all the great stuff from my parents’ house as I didn’t want to tear his home apart if my experiment didn’t work out. I called it our summer cottage and, frankly, I hoped my dad would want to stay there for a couple of months at least in the summer and make it easier on all of us. I thought there was a chance if he loved it we would sell the family home. While I didn’t take furniture, I went through my parents’ home and took out twelve boxes of loot to make the “summer cottage” look like home.

My dad lives in California most of the time, and he came back to Chicago for a couple of months a year ago last May. Usually we would wait a couple of days for him to acclimatize to the time change, but he was anxious to see the “summer cottage” and we took him to see it the day after he returned from California. He took one look around and said to his housekeeper, “Go get my stuff”—and he has not left. Our family house of fifty years was big, but not practical for a person in a wheelchair. My dad was limited to two or three rooms at most. The new summer cottage (frankly, a lovely brick home) had a first-floor bedroom, a screened-in porch off the master bedroom, and a bathroom that had been converted and was fully handicap accessible and easy to use. The summer cottage has multiple rooms for him to enjoy. He can eat outside, in the kitchen, or in the dining room and the house, while half the size of his original, is much more conducive to company. It was about a third of the price of his home on the lake but so much more comfortable for everyone. We sold the family home and now we are trying to fit some of the more precious furniture into the new house.

I should have made this move for him long ago. I would urge you to think about what is best for your older relatives and for the family. I promised my dad I would never put him in a nursing home, but I didn’t promise I wouldn’t move him. We found the most important thing was to have people around my dad as often as possible. He has twenty-minute visits several times a day from his great-grandkids with one of their parents. And at other times, his grandkids (my adult children) pop in for coffee. IT IS SO NICE. And everything is new and fresh. I am convinced that the newness and the understanding that there is “new stuff” to look forward to even at ninety-seven is a real motivation for my dad.