There comes a time for many of boomer women when they have to face the inevitability of finding care for their aging parents, or even for themselves. About ten years ago my mother needed senior housing and I’ve learned an awful lot about senior care since then.

My father had passed away years before so my five siblings and I talked our mom into moving into a retirement facility. We felt that our fiercely independent mother (an RN with five WWII battle stars) could manage in senior living much better than she could in her apartment. My mother, independent or not, was happy for some help at that point, and agreed.

Senior Housing

Senior housing is different in different places, but, for the most part, it involves apartments or condos that offer some sort of a meal package, a place for residents to park their cars – and many have cars – and accommodations for older people. The bathrooms have handrails in the bathtubs and there are often emergency call pulls in each room. Each apartment or condo has its own bedroom and kitchen. The cost of such living depends on whether it’s low income housing, which it was in my mother’s case it was, or housing for more affluent seniors. There’s limited “supervision” and everyone comes and goes as they please. However, everyone tends to look after everyone else a little bit, too. Often residents only need to be 55 to enter senior living housing.

Then one day I got the call that my mother was in the hospital. Her diabetes had become increasing difficult to control and we had been worried about it. The night before, she had tripped when she got out of bed to make a trip to the bathroom and had ended up lying on the floor all night – cold and semiconscious as her blood sugar levels plummeted. In the morning her calls alerted a security guard who called an ambulance.