There is a series of articles in AARP about housing alternatives for those of us aging.
As I am certain everyone know what AARP is, but…if you’ve never taken the time to fully define it, myself being one, I looked it up in Wikipedia and they told me the following:
AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, is a United States-based non-governmental organization and interest group, founded by Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus in 1958 and based in Washington, D.C. According to its mission statement,[1] it is "a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization for people age 50 and over ... dedicated to enhancing quality of life for all as we age," which "provides a wide range of unique benefits, special products, and services for our members."
They publish a bulletin monthly. My wife gave me a copy and it contained the article that went in my archive yesterday entitled . The article in the net showed many links and I started following them. They are all good and I will carry the more relevant ones in a series on alternative housing. My comments on each may be brief, they may not, I never know until I am finished writing. The articles to fit the theme I will be following for a while in this Blog.
The theme is what we must and can do for ourselves. The reason for the theme is simple enough; we have to because no one else is about to. We are a group fielding the mixed malady of aging and Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). As such we are faced with needs and no way to fulfill them.
When we are sufficiently competent to care for ourselves or be cared for at home by a loving, dedicated, heroic caretaker there is nothing for us to help us find our way and avoid further digression into the loss of our bodies, mind and life that is the pattern of AD. I have discussed them earlier in this series, ways and means to stem the decline and gain some quality of life.
There will be more of this, but for the moment as I have this treasure trove of housing possibility at my fingertips I will comment on these.
Take a look at Elder Cohousing A new option for retirement — or sooner! in my Archive. This article describes a wonderful alternative to anything we have not.
Elder Cohousing is a dream that is almost too much to hope for. It puts the people needing it in control. The group that forms to do it, or to buy into such a project pre-existing, can make it what they want to make it. The kind that any individual needs is one that that person can afford, one that will provide the person a quality of life, one that can provide more than those of us yet competent and cognizant have sitting at home, bored, waiting until it is time to go into the “Home” Nothing fills that getting to the “Home” quicker than sitting waiting for it and doing nothing about it.
One of the more telling lines in the article was this:
Darlington has seen, firsthand, the life she doesn't want. "I have patients with a ton of money, long-term care insurance and round-the-clock caregivers, and they sit in their lovely homes bored and lonely,"
To: “sit in their lovely homes bored and lonely," is simply sitting and waiting for the train or the bus to take us to the “Home.” With all that money can buy it cannot buy the help we need to deter slippery slide that AD is.
Alternative housing gives us a chance to stem the tide of the slippery slide. It is an all-around Win-Win. It is in the interest of our good health, it enhances our quality of life and it gives us what we would not otherwise have because most of our resources are sufficient enough to require us to pay for what we get, but aren’t sufficient to pay for what we need.
The cost of Home Care, Day Care, Assisted Living Care, Nursing Home Care and all of the other private/professional Kinds of Care cost too much for us to afford them. It is in this that cohousing and other alternative housing options offer the wherewithal to control the cost and placing it within the orbit of our affordability.
We can design it, we can control it, we can do it closer to cost that any developer tuned into all of the perks from Washington to Wall Street.
This alternative is one of many by which we can do it. The numbers of people developing AD that is coming, the squander that has occurred in government this past 30 years have taken any public health relief out of the picture. The dedicated professional groups such as the Alzheimer’s Association are so busy raising money to fund research to find a cure then do something about those already with the disease.
Yes we have been left out in the cold. The door is closed. Our only place is to find a nice safe secure spot to light our own fire.
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