Channeling Grama to Build a New Life

When my two younger brothers and I were all in high school, our maternal grandmother moved from California to our Upstate New York town after retiring, and took an apartment a few blocks from our family home. We didn’t realize it at the time, but she had rosy dreams of the three of us stopping by her place regularly on our way home from school for something like cookies and milk. I’m not sure what else she expected to happen along those lines — confidences, shopping trips together; I just know now that she was deeply disappointed.

We were, I think, a senior, junior and freshman — in our teens, with strong peer groups, navigating all kinds of classic teenage interests and issues. The last thing on our minds, although I don’t recall ever discussing it, was spending a lot of time with a grandmother. The reason I know about her expectations and deep disillusion is that my mom told me about it many years later. It has haunted me ever since that we let her down, even if we didn’t know that we were doing so — it wasn’t anything deliberate; just normal teenage cluelessness and self-absorption.

My middle brother does recall going by Grama’s place often because she would have something good to eat and he could always find a half-empty pack of cigarettes to take with him. He also remembers hearing that she wasn’t happy with the amount of time we spent with her.

My youngest brother remembers trying to make a point of going to Grama for dinner when he’d come home for visits — she would make wienerschnitzel (breaded chicken) for him.

I’ve thought about this recently in light of making a major life move of my own. In trying to be what we nowadays call intentional in the what, why and how of that move, I think I was channeling Grama and her experience.

A few months ago, with an early-70s birthday on the near horizon and a couple of (luckily minor) health issues in mind, I started thinking about how I or my family would handle a crisis if I had one. I was living in a small condo building with good friends among fellow residents, in a wonderfully walkable neighborhood. I was in pretty good shape — mentally still competent and functional, still driving, financially independent, physically fair to middling — but had seen instances of crisis among friends and neighbors that made me start to worry a little bit.

For instance, an upstairs neighbor literally, as he said, tripped over his own feet and fell in their hallway, landing on his back and seriously injuring his neck and spinal cord. He survived but went through a heart attack, surgery, rehab, and physical and personality changes that affected his wife in trying to look after him.

Our building started locking the street-door access at night for security reasons, which made sense but meant it could have been challenging for emergency responders to get access if I fell or had some other medical issue after 10 p.m. and couldn’t reach a neighbor to let them into the building.

I knew about caregiving both intellectually (I co-authored a book about eldercare and have written several articles about that topic) and first-hand (I looked after my mom and then my husband). Thanks to my husband’s desire to move to my hometown after he retired, we were already there when my mom’s health took a dive, so we didn’t have to manage care from a distance or do a lot of traveling back and forth to make sure she was OK. We also found great resources in terms of reliable, skilled home health aides and excellent medical services. Both came in handy a few years later when my husband’s health started to decline. Those experiences, as well as what I was seeing around me more recently, were enough to create a sense of urgency about being in a better environment for that “just in case” moment myself.

I already had one experience of receiving family support that was only available from a distance: I had major abdominal surgery a few years ago, and my middle brother, who lives in New Mexico, came to St. Louis to be there for the week of my surgery, and one of my nieces also came in to help for a few days. It was wonderful, and gratifying, and a huge relief — but I knew what a burden it could have been if anything had gone wrong and I had needed ongoing care.

I have three generations of family here in New Mexico, near Albuquerque: my brother and his wife, their daughter and her family, their son and his family, and even a cousin and her family. (Our other brother lives overseas; his older daughter is also in New Mexico, although not in the same town.) Partly because I wasn’t finding anywhere in St. Louis that seemed worth moving to with caregiving in mind for the future and partly because staying in that area would have meant that family members would still have had to do long-distance caregiving, I started thinking about moving to the Albuquerque area so they wouldn’t have to travel or deal with all the aspects of caregiving from a distance in that future.

Although I wasn’t consciously aware of it at the time, my grandmother’s experience must have been in the back of my mind, because instead of upping sticks and moving to New Mexico without warning, I called my brother to ask what he thought about such a plan. I didn’t want him to feel like I was horning in on his community and lifestyle, or that I would be a burden either personally or medically. To my delight and gratitude, he was totally supportive.

In the way these things sometimes evolve, I found a place nearby a couple of weeks later, became the owner early in the then-new year, and poof, moved from St. Louis to Albuquerque at the end of this past March.

The first few weeks were unexpected fulfillment of my reason for the move: Between a few bouts of dehydration in getting used to the higher altitude and extreme dry heat, and a case of sciatica caused by the packing process that led to overusing over-the-counter pain relievers that created a bleeding ulcer and a couple of 911 calls and a week in the hospital, my first few weeks here involved a lot of hands-on care from family. It was everything I hoped it would be — just way sooner than I expected! I figured it would be a few years before I needed that kind of help.

With those hassles out of the way, the move, and this new life stage, has been great. On the one hand, I’m spending lots of very enjoyable family time, including birthday parties, frequent lunch and dinner outings, and hosting my niece, nephew and their spouses and kids at the pool in my new community. On the other, I’m making new friends among my neighbors at my new place, a nearby bookstore, and a couple of professional associations that I’ve joined since the move. It’s a good — and healthy — balance between strengthening connections with family and creating new ones so they don’t feel constrained by my addition to the area.

I’m very lucky. It feels like I’ve made the best response to what I recall about my grandmother’s experience, and maybe am making up for it by doing this move a little better. I still feel guilty about not fulfilling her dream, but am glad to have learned from what I know about it. I hope she somehow sees that she contributed to my new phase of life.