This week we continue to learn what senior living is like from residents. Suzanne Newman on the Answers for Elders podcast is joined by Jen, daughter of resident Ann at Chateau Pacific in Lynnwood, Washington. Jennifer McKassan is agency owner at Apples to Zebras Insurance in Lynnwood, so she works within the industry where people are investigating long term care planning.
Jen says, "People drive too long, or they keep their houses for too long, and they keep that responsibility for them for too long. And for whatever reason they do it, it ends up putting everybody involved into a place of of crisis. When it does come to the point where everybody involved realizes, oh, dear, it's time. And it was probably time about a year ago. I've seen families where they were dealing with degenerative illness, and they just didn't want to accept that that was the the next phase of life. When you own the timeline, you can control the timeline. And what I've seen was people who didn't do that ended up with a more expensive experience, a more traumatic experience, and a more damaged relationship with their families. I didn't want that with my mom. I wanted to be my mom's daughter all the way to the end of her life."
Jen described her mom's journey after retirement. She had been staying temporarily with Jen and her husband. "Mom had stopped driving, and she didn't know how to use paratransit yet. And my husband and I are both active professionals. We didn't have that flexibility in our days to really give mom the life that she wanted as a retired person. That active life, the 'hey, I want to go to a museum on a Wednesday' and I'm like, 'boy, would that be fun. I have to work. I have five appointments today,' and having to say, 'No, mom, I can't do that.' It takes its toll. And it turns you from a daughter to kind of a gatekeeper to fun. And I don't want to be the gatekeeper on my mom's fun."
But having those conversations is difficult. Suzanne pointed out, "We don't necessarily know how to have those conversations with dad or with mom, when the talking isn't matching what's happening. You're not fine, Dad, and you're not able to get up, you're a fall risk. You're going to have a bad fall. A lot of us as adult children don't know how to have the conversations or we're in a situation where we feel like it's not our place."
Jen replied, "It is our place. If you're the one picking up the pieces, it is your place. And you have an absolute right to say something about that, and almost an obligation, in my opinion, because it it's a hard conversation to have. It's a courageous conversation to have. And when we come at it from a place of love and that's what I did with my mom, I came at it from a place of love. I'm like, 'I don't want to be picking a place out of thin air just because they had a bed open and whatever we could afford that had a bed open and, you know, maybe this place will work and maybe it won't. I want to own this timeline. I want you to get to know people there. I want you to make friends there. I want you to feel like you belong there.'"
Jen adds, "There's a 70% chance that we will need assisted living or some form of assistive care in our later years. So if there's a 70% chance that something is going to happen, like it's going to rain, we're going to bring a raincoat, right? So when we when we talk about owning the timeline, we pick the place. We're going to get those services before we need them, move in when we're still independent, when we might not need what they have to offer in the greatest sense. But we pick the place we belong, so that we can make the friends. We can use our brain plasticity while we have it, to make friends and find new activities. Like Mom had never played video games like Wii Jeopardy before. I was like, Oh, this is fantastic. And Wii Bowling.
"Owning the timeline means that we accept that there's only a 30% chance that we won't need the kinds of services that are available readily and quickly from a trusted provider here at a retirement community like Chateau Pacific. So if we can get to a place where, when we need those services, it's not. 'Oh dear, Mom broke her hip. Now we have to hire a nurse or find something emergency-style, or somebody has got to take a month off of work to do all this work' — versus, 'Oh, dear, Mom broke her hip. Hey, could we get some help in her room? Do we need to kick in a care plan?' Different experience, very different conversation. Doesn't disrupt the life of the children that are adults in their prime-earning years. It doesn't disrupt the family by completely upending everything. It provides trusted care to the person."
Jen also says, "I think that the brain is a muscle. and when we don't use muscles, they atrophy. And when all we do is feed our muscles garbage like TV — with all love for all of the TV shows that are out there, they're not helping our brains stay active. They're not demanding critical thinking skills. They're not demanding that we stay active and engaged with our world. People who stay active engage with their worlds through those organic conversations with each other, through sharing their memories, through hanging out with their kids, through having drinks at happy hours, having dinner with different people every day, through having to remember names in the elevator. All those things are great exercises for helping keep the the neurons firing in the brain strong as long as humanly possible.
"Just walking to dinner, mom definitely had a difference in her stamina, even between living at our house ,where she walked from her bedroom to the living room to the kitchen. Now she's walking the hallways now, using those muscles. She's got to walk way longer to get to the to the dining hall. And just that amount of walking alone and going to and from the activities has been really good for her stamina and her motor skills."
Chateau Retirement provides independent living, assisted living, and memory care services. They have been locally owned and family operated for more than 25 years. Chateau Retirement has three communities in Washington's Seattle/Puget Sound area: Chateau Pacific in Lynnwood, Bothell Landing in Bothell, and Chateau Valley Center in Renton.
Visit Chateau online or call 800.960.1944. Visit Chateau's specialist page on Answers for Elders.
Mentioned in this episode:
Chateau Retirement
Chateau Retirement