Most of what I bring to senior transitions comes from professional experience. Some of it comes from something closer to home.

Finding the Right Care Wasn’t Simple

In 2014, my mother had her first stroke. We started with live-in caregivers, working through local agencies to find the right fit — and it wasn’t simple. Even with my aunt living with her, offering steady emotional support, my aunt’s own health meant she couldn’t take on physical caregiving herself. Over the next year, we went through a handful of caregivers. I made the drive to my mother’s home three or four times a week, an hour each way, trying to help each new caregiver understand what she needed, and trying to reassure my mother that we’d find something that worked.

In front of me, she held herself together — that’s who she’s always been, someone who doesn’t complain, who never says a bad word about anyone. But my aunt saw a different side of it: the daily reality of her new limitations weighing on her in ways she didn’t let me see. Even with family meetings and everyone doing their best, the toll a transition like this takes on a family is hard to fully describe until you’ve lived it.

After a year, it became clear my mother needed more consistent, professional support than any of us could keep piecing together on our own. That was the moment a real decision had to be made. The comfort of her home of over 40 years mattered — it always does — but it no longer matched what she actually needed day to day. And the pace I’d been keeping, driving hours several times a week, wasn’t sustainable either.

Eleven years, multiple strokes, a broken hip, pneumonia, and more hospital stays than I can count later, my mother is still with us at 92, and still going strong. Knowing she has people around her who understand her needs — however much they’ve changed over the years — gives me real peace of mind, for her sake and mine.

Selling Her Home

The last real updates to my mother’s home were made fifteen years earlier. The flooring, the paint, the kitchen and bathrooms — all of it showed its age. She needed to transition to full-time care, and our family was spread too far apart to manage a full renovation of a home none of us were living in. We sold it as-is, to an investor who ended up moving into the home himself. Whoever it ended up being, there was real comfort in knowing another family would get to enjoy it.