Midnight Mutterings | Planning

Pretty sure not one of us thinks planning for aging is simple. First of all, we have to decide at what age we will be officially old. That is until there’s really no question that time passed a long time ago. Then we have to guess how long that time of being old will last. Sometimes the short length of time is obvious, if remarkably painful. As when we have a diagnosis that will be terminal very soon. Otherwise we can only guess, looking at actuarial charts, observing our family histories, watching our friends who have had similar life experiences. But it’s all a crap shoot, at best. Then there’s thinking of circumstances, particularly how long our healthy lifespan might be. Whether dementia is in our near future and how to know. How to guess. We all have friends who have diagnoses of mild cognitive impairment, or frank Alzheimer’s, and some who choose to avoid investigating prognoses altogether.

I know there are groups on Orcas Island working on aging in place, which is a good idea, if complicated, given the limited resources. The most interesting groups of people I know have long discussed having a group of friends who have been planning a self-managed group home, of finding a large house and helping each other, of hiring helpers. However, I personally don’t know any groups who have actually found a house, hired helpers, moved in.

Some of us have children, grandchildren who may be expected to help us when we need it, but counting on that is always tricky for so many reasons, and many of us do not have that option.

Looking at my own family, I don’t know what to expect. My own parents died without dementia as far as I could tell. My mother at 80, from diabetes and heart failure and my father at 96. (My father’s brothers did not have such long healthy lives, however, and my father might have been just an outlier, who had a healthy lifestyle with remarkably good mental and physical health.) Yet my oldest sister died with frank Alzheimer’s, in assisted living with her adult children in attendance. My second sister lives at home with 24/7 care, supervised by her adult children. I don’t know much about my brother’s circumstances. As far as I know he is doing well. All of my siblings’ spouses have died. Only my oldest sister had grandchildren, two, meaning the rest of us do not. My daughter’s death eight years ago, after a decade of pretty good health following a stem cell transplant for a rare hematological cancer.

So here’s how I’m planning: I know I can’t live on Orcas Island full time when I can no longer drive. My one surviving child moved to Bellingham when his sister moved there following her transplant in 2008. They lived five blocks apart and were great support for each other. Several years ago, the lot next to my son (who lives alone, if you don’t count our two cats) became available and I bought it. It has taken a lot of planning, but by the end of the summer, we will have moved a house from Kirkland via Nickel Brothers, who have been moving houses and buildings since the fifties, to that lot. That project has taken a lot of time and effort (and heartbreak when a couple of houses I loved in Canada fell through). But I think this is a good solution for the last years of my life. There is work to be done to that effort: excavation, addition of an enclosed sunny front porch and a daylight basement, for when I need a caretaker, should I last that long. And it will provide income and perhaps companionship for my son after my death. We have friends in the neighborhood, and at least one child, which is lucky. And my daughter’s friends from the ten years she lived there have been lovely. I hope to spend time on Orcas when possible. Many of my dear neighbor/friends are aging as well, and there have been too many recent deaths and empty houses, but also some young neighbors with children remaining.

I’m not sure why I am writing of such personal stuff, except it is much on my mind, and something we all have to face eventually. Golly, grown up stuff is hard, even for someone as lucky as I have been. And I think the ideas from my previous column (5/16/2026) on Radical Acceptance is really helping me in this planning stage of life.