Have you thought about what kind of “senior living community” you want to die in? Godawful phrase that, innit, Senior Living? For most of my peers it is a perpetual thought; many are burying their octogenarian parents and are now confronted with the pressing considerations of their own future domestic arrangements.
Aging right where you are, in the comfort of the home you built during your decades of building other things like career and family is the ideal, but that is – tragically – seldom the most practical or feasible. In the baby-boomer/GenZ generations now approaching old age, many have experienced divorce and separation that shattered the family home and financial nest-egg alike. The options become bleak without vast wealth; it is increasingly expensive to be old, about which I could prattle on about for hours, but won’t do right now. (Have you seen the cost of denture cream and incontinence pants???) I’m talking today about choosing the porch we want to sit on in our rocking chair, where we can fritter and waste our twilight hours in an offhand way on loud speakers, whilst we wait to buy the farm, as it were. Kick the bucket, shuffle off this mortal coil, drift off into the Big Sleep. Euphemisms for the only event we’re ever fully sure of all our lives.
Setting aside the moolah, where to live so that you get the most joy out of the misery of aging becomes a problem, because all the traditional options have RULES AND REGULATIONS, and I personally had enough of those in the last six decades, thank you very much. Most nursing homes, assisted living facilities, retirement homes, retirement communities are institutional by definition and design. Institutions are not the sort of places I could stay out of trouble for a hot minute: it’s just the employer-headmistress-class captain (and attendant snitches) constrained environment in which I DON’T want to live out the rest of my years.
There are community alternatives, cohousing options, and deliberately-formed communities gaining popularity. In Kanazawa, Japan, for example, a village called Share Kanazawa has achieved the dream version of such a community. As we think about issues of continuing care, it is critical that we think not only of the practical aspects of a senior community but also of the emotional value a home brings to a person.”[1] Older people are becoming more discerning about their housing choices and local authorities and their partners recognise that current housing supply for older people does not match their housing needs and aspirations. Indeed, some existing sheltered housing is declining in popularity in many areas of the country. At the same time, retirement villages can be large, expensive, and paternalistic.[2]
SHARE KANASAWA IN JAPAN Pic copyright: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/02/15/national/kanazawa-retirement-community-relocation-tokyo-success-story/
The hippies of the 60’s are now senior citizens. Are there any old folks homes that play psychedelic music, art, and practice eastern mysticism, catering to the elderly hippies? Most of us certainly don’t feel quite that old yet. If you were in your late teens or early twenties when the whole thing really got off the ground with the Summer of Love in in 1967, you are now in your seventies. Assisted living is still a decade or two off. If you were a baby born out of that fecund summer, you are now a sexagenarian, and the sex- part of that is a fading issue in comparison to the disloyal knees and unreliable hips that come at midnight when you turn 60.
The ‘cohousing community’ is a subject of mounting interest to older people in Britain. It offers a realistic alternative to a tradition of paternalism and benign neglect in relation to the old and isolated. It involves the older person as citizen not service recipient.
It’s a lifestyle choice where living in a close-knit, intentional community improves health, reduces the need for senior services, fosters rewarding relationships, and makes life more affordable and fun. And like intergenerational cohousing, senior cohousing is a solution to today’s social and environmental challenges.
Senior communities typically are defined as communities for people who are 55+ and they follow all the same norms as other cohousing communities, including shared management and maintenance of the property, common meals, several common areas and smaller individual homes, supplemented by several shared spaces and amenities.
With so many of the small towns in South Africa all but abandoned since the closure of their railway stations and the subsequent migration of younger generations to big cities, buying a whole settlement with like-minded delinquents becomes an attractive dream. I’ve been testing the viability of this for a few years now, renting shacks in paradise, so to speak. What I have found, is that living in a glass house, no matter how deep in the woods, does bring a lot of moths. Small town newcomers pretty much fall into two groups: people running away from something and people running away from everything. I think I’ll go out and ask a few contemporaries what works for them, and write a bit more about it. Watch this space…
REFERENCES / FURTHER READING:
[1] https://www.eldies.org/blog/sharekanazawa
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331993482_Is_co-living_a_housing_solution_for_vulnerable_older_people_Literature_review
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