Retirement Communities

Are Not In My Plans

Five people gathered for lunch at our house the other day. One guest was eighty, the others in their early-to-mid-seventies. The topic of moving into a retirement community came up just after I poured everyone their first glass of wine.

A couple---she 72, he 75---reported that they'd recently put a deposit down on a unit in a retirement community in South Portland. It's on the water, run as a not-for-profit and has been around (and solvent) for decades, they said. They're on a waiting list.

In a recent survey, Maine ranked as the #6 best state in which to retire, with a #1 ranking for quality of life. Details on the methodology used for those rankings can be found here. (In case you're wondering, the five states ahead of Maine, in descending order are: Wyoming, West Virginia, Florida, Montana and Delaware).

I consider myself a planner. I started saving for retirement early in my career, set aside money for my kids' college education, and regularly had the oil changed. I've been planning my retirement for decades, but a retirement community has not been in the picture.

Regular oil changes, it turns out, are unnecessary except during the first 15,000 miles of a new car's life. Thereafter, you're just being exploited by the auto repair industry, that's selling you something you don't need. (My source for that is an executive who used to design cars for Ford).

Retirement communities are also, to a certain extent, in the oil change business. Like sources of auto care, there are several types of them, each with a different name and level of service. Sullivan's may sell you tires, and do most routine service on your car, but if your BMW needs a computer fix, you'll have to drive to the Portland dealership. There's the lifecare community, the continuing care retirement community, assisted living, long-term care, and quite a few other options. One study suggests we have thirty types of these facilities. If you total your car you’ll need the services of a body shop specialist. When your mind and/ or body are totaled by old age, you too will need special care.

Whatever they're called and whatever their differing levels of care, many of these places claim they have a multi-year waiting list. This is one of the oil changes they're selling. They advise you to make a down-payment now for a unit you might want to live in at some point.

There's a well-regarded and long-established such place close to where we are in Midcoast Maine. It too says it has a long waiting list. A friend of mine whose parents, now in their nineties, needed the particular level of services offered by that facility were recently able to buy a unit there and move them in within a matter of weeks. These waiting lists and down payments are often marketing ploys, designed to ensure that the operators can run the place at or near full occupancy, and fund their operations without drawing down on their revolving loan with the bank to fund cash flow needs. Smart business decision. I'd do the same if I were in charge.

Another Maine friend told me about the experience her father recently had. At 96 this entrepreneur and graduate of Harvard Business School moved into an assisted living place in the Midcoast. As is common with people of that age, they're prone to falling. His facility had a policy that every time a resident fell, he needed to be transported to the local hospital for evaluation. After several falls, but no injuries sustained, the ambulance service said it would no longer provide transport for these unnecessary trips to the hospital. While he was in the local hospital under observation after one such fall, the facility notified him that he'd need to find another place to live. They wouldn't change their policy about how to treat falls, and the hospital would no longer provide transport, so the assistance he thought he'd purchased would no longer be available.

His family moved him to a nearby long-term care facility where they'd be able to monitor and respond to his falls. The problem, my friend tells me, is that every other person in his new residence has serious psycho-geriatric impairments and none can really speak. So this man's ‘community’ is limited to talking to members of the staff. So much for those benefits of communal living where you sit on the veranda and reminisce. In the place that evicted him, this gentlemen had people with whom he could socialize, including some longtime friends.

Long-term care in a good facility in Maine can cost $15,000 a month, or more. If you have the relevant health insurance policy, it will defray some of those costs, but those policies have a cap on total pay-outs. My friend's father is now billed $16,000 a month, of which $4,000 is reimbursed by insurance until the cap is reached.

Leaving aside the financial details, I'm quite petrified by the idea of living in such a place. My health is fine now at 73, but who knows what the coming years will bring? There are many scenarios I could stew over. A painful cancer kills me in ten months. A stroke incapacitates me and I'm confined to moving around in a wheelchair for the remainder of my days. Dementia, Parkinson's or ALS are also prime possibilities. Or I could die in my sleep at 93. It's not possible to plan for any of this, as there are too many variables to process. Not to mention my wife, who's 70, no doubt will have a different scenario to deal with. We control few, if any, of those events, especially the speed at which our decline may occur. So what does planning actually mean here?

In these later years of my life, I'd prefer to be around young people, my granddaughter Zoe, in particular. She's only three and just getting used to me. I look forward to reading her Charlotte's Web, Caps for Sale, Freddy the Pig, and many other important books. And we must watch the Wizard of Oz together, many times. I want to teach her to play tennis and make pizza. I want Zoe to memorize The Gettysburg Address, just as I taught her mother to do so when she was six or seven.

I have no interest in sitting in a wicker chair on the veranda reminiscing about life with people I just met at the a few months ago. They're perfectly nice folks, I'm sure, but to the extent I have the interest or energy in reminiscing with anyone, it will only be with people I've known for a long time---my old friends and some family members. Sharing and re-living my past with strangers will not be a rewarding experience for me. In truth I'm quite bored with my past. Living through it once was quite enough. It wasn't all that great a movie to begin with, and I have no desire to watch it again.

Of course it's likely, perhaps certain, that what I want and what I need will not synchronize as I drift into old age. I may want to take care of myself, but at some point that may no longer be realistic. I may then need several sets of crutches: one pair to walk with, and other sets attached to the people who help me with this and that---which could in my future include pretty much everything I need to get through the day. I will then circle back, following the Sphinx's riddle, into life as a fully dependent, three-legged person.

There's no way someone gets old without the need for some or all of those crutches. Retirement communities try to convince us that all those crutches will be nearly invisible, they're just part of the furniture in your new life at Ocean Shores. That furniture and those crutches are all included in your monthly bill at your new home. Since everyone around you is crutch-dependent to one degree or another, you're supposed to imagine you're living life optimally.

When I was a middle-school English teacher, some years I assigned Lois Lowry's 1993 dystopian novel The Giver. You may have read it. If not, read the summary and then draw a Venn diagram comparing retirement communities to Jonas's world.

We've all heard it said over and again that people choose to live in retirement communities to avoid becoming a burden on their adult children. That's a goal I certainly share, but moving into Ocean Shores is not the only way to achieve it.

As I have no clairvoyance as to the details of my end-of-life story, I choose to do what I've learned to be after many years. I'm a conservative and want to make no dramatic moves, but to wait and see what time brings my way. Conservatism, as the great English philosopher Michael Oakeshott wrote, is a habit of mind that prefers the familiar, the tried and the limited over the unknown and the untried. It's about valuing what is present, what makes up one's established world.

When the time comes, and it must, I will acquire the crutches I need and stay at home with my books. I may no longer have this wonderful view of the coast of Maine outside my windows, but I can live without that. As long as I can still remember stuff I'll have fond memories of those views, but at a certain point living in a two-storey large house on a dirt road may not be our choice. Home care is expensive for sure, but so is paying $16,000 a month to a facility. I long ago canceled my long-term health insurance policy. The premiums kept rising dramatically, the benefit cap rose at a lower rate, and I decided it made more sense to self-insure. I still think it does.

There's another view of what conservative means here. Making that down payment and moving into a retirement community before you're in steep decline is said to be smart, prudent, careful. It's planning ahead, the wise move. Surely, there are myriad examples of seniors who did exactly that and are very glad they took shelter in such a place before the final storms raged against them. Conservative here is analogous to weather forecasting. However, experience has taught us that there are several ways to survive most storms.