Sometimes I Feel Like a Piece of Bologna

50 Questions for Seniors to Ask Before They Move

Lisa Dunn in Real Sage Advice lists 50 questions seniors (or their Gen Sandwich offspring) should ask before making a move. Good questions and worth considering.

Not that they would have made a difference to my parents. We knew it was time for them to move when my 82-year-old mom was climbing up onto the roof to sweep the leaves and lugging the garbage down a 45-degree angle driveway in the rain. We needed to get them onto flat ground and into a place requiring less maintenance. My step dad was already mostly blind by then, so most of the maintenance fell to Mom. And I was worried about a real fall.

We talked to them about moving to a senior mobile home complex for about a year. They didn’t want to move, but realized the time was coming. One day I got a call asking if I’d come up and look with them. I asked if we were just looking or buying. Just looking. So we drove up and met with their realtor and looked at several mobile homes. None of them were quite “it.”

I suggested that we also look at assisted living while we were there. We went to the one place they knew of—a multi-story rather ugly monolith filled with walkers and wheel chairs and old people. We saw someone they knew, who invited us in to see her little two-room apartment. I could see my step dad emotionally shutting down. We left, went back to the house and agreed to keep looking. Hubby and I drove home, expecting to come back again in a few weeks.

The next day I got a call. Dad had made an offer on one of the places we had looked at. It was the cleanest and most attractive, but also the darkest. And only two bedrooms. Not perfect, but it’s been home for almost three years now.

A year or so after the move, they finally stopped blaming me for making them move, and finally began to consider this as home. Most of the time.

Labels: aging parents, housing, moving, seniors