Home for Later Life

Kapitel 1: Starting with Yourself: What Do You Really Want?

The leaflet had been lying on the kitchen table since Sunday. Rosewood Court, Apartments for Independent Later Living, and on the front a photograph of four people laughing over coffee in a bright dining room, none of whom looked as though they had ever had a bad morning. Her daughter had left it there with a yellow sticky note: Just have a look, Mum. No pressure. By Tuesday Mrs Berger had read it three times. Each time her tea went cold while she read, and each time she put the leaflet down with a small tight feeling under her ribs that she could not quite name. It was not anger. Her daughter meant well, and had driven ninety minutes to bring it. It was something closer to being handed the answer to a question nobody had asked her yet.

That question is the whole of this opening chapter, and it is simpler than it sounds. Before you measure a single doorway, before you price a walk-in shower or write to a housing scheme for a brochure, you need to know what you are actually trying to protect. Most conversations about housing in later life start at the wrong end. They start with the object: this house, that flat, this scheme with the nice garden and the eleven-month waiting list. The object is easy to talk about. It has photographs and a monthly charge and an address. But an object can only be judged against a standard, and if you have no standard of your own, you will end up borrowing somebody else's: the leaflet's, the estate agent's, your well-meaning son-in-law's, or the standard of whoever spoke loudest at the last family lunch.

So we begin with you. Not with your knees, not with your bank statement, and not with what your neighbour did last year when her hip went. With what you value, in your own words, written down and put in order. It takes an afternoon. It is the cheapest work in this entire book, and every later chapter depends on it, because every later chapter asks you to make a comparison, and comparisons need a yardstick.

The card sort: making the invisible visible

Here is the exercise. You will need ten small cards, or ten slips of paper cut from an envelope, and a pen. Index cards are ideal because they feel deliberate in the hand, but the back of a cereal box works just as well. On each card you write one thing that a home can give you. Then you sort them. That is all there is to it, and the reason it works is not mysterious: when the criteria sit in your head, they all feel important at once, and importance without ranking is useless for deciding anything. Cards force a choice. You cannot put two cards in the same place on the table.

The ten cards

• Familiarity – knowing this street, this view, these shops, this bed under this window
• Independence – managing the ordinary day without asking anyone
• Closeness to family – being reachable, and being reached, quickly
• Safety and reassurance – knowing help would come, and come fast
• Peace and quiet – no traffic under the window, no footsteps overhead
• Being in the middle of things – shops, buses, a café, people passing
• Company – easy, unplanned contact with others, without arranging it a week ahead
• Outdoor space – a garden, a balcony, a place to put your hands in soil
• Financial breathing room – low fixed costs, money left over, no anxiety about the standing charges
• Room for your life – space for guests, a workbench, the piano, the books, the dog

Take an eleventh blank card for whatever the list has missed. Somebody will write my sewing room. Somebody will write my own front door, that nobody else has a key to. Somebody will write the cemetery within walking distance, and that is a perfectly serious housing criterion for a person who visits a grave every Sunday and intends to go on doing so. The blank card is often the most honest one on the table.

Now sort. First into three loose piles: essential, would like, can live without. Do it fast, without deliberating, because your first instinct here is usually more truthful than your third. Then take only the essential pile, which is normally between four and seven cards, and put those in a single vertical column, best at the top. This second step is the one people resist. Everything in that pile is genuinely important to you, and ranking feels like betraying whatever ends up at the bottom. Do it anyway. You are not throwing anything away. You are deciding what wins when two good things cannot both be had, and that situation will arise, probably several times, in the months ahead.

If the ranking stalls, use head-to-head comparisons. Hold up two cards and ask a concrete question: if a flat gave me peace and quiet but took away being in the middle of things, would I take it? Then swap them and ask again. Concrete beats abstract every time. Abstractly, everyone wants safety. Concretely, the question is whether you would accept a warden checking on you every morning at half past eight in exchange for it, and that is a question you can actually answer.

Three people, three completely different answers

Mrs Berger did the card sort on a Thursday, with the radio off, which she says was the hardest part. Her top card was familiarity, and she was almost embarrassed by it, because it sounded to her like stubbornness dressed up in nicer clothes. It is not stubbornness. Look at what familiarity actually does for her. She has lived in the same street for thirty-one years. The pharmacist knows her repeat prescription without looking it up. The man in the corner shop carries her bag to the door if it is raining and does not make a performance of it. When her husband died, three people on that street noticed within a day that her curtains were still shut at eleven in the morning, and one of them rang the bell. That is not sentimentality. That is a functioning safety net, built over three decades, and it does not transfer. If she moves four miles, she keeps her furniture and loses the network, and the network is worth more than the furniture.

Her second card was independence, her third financial breathing room. Company came fifth, and outdoor space did not make her essential pile at all, which surprised her daughter, who had spent two years assuming her mother missed the old garden. She does not. She got rid of it gladly and has three pots of herbs on a windowsill. The conclusion Mrs Berger reached that afternoon was clear enough to write in one sentence: I want to stay in this street, and I am willing to spend money and accept some inconvenience to do it. We will follow her through this book. In Chapter 12 she weighs adapting against moving with that sentence in front of her, and in Chapter 18 she makes her decision, eleven months after the leaflet appeared on her table. The decision is hers, and it is a good one, and it is not the one her daughter expected.

Mr Osei sorted his cards differently, and for a reason that had nothing to do with sentiment. He had a knee replacement two years ago and a shoulder that is unreliable in cold weather. His top card was independence, and when he was asked to say what independence meant in practice, he did not talk about driving or holidays. He talked about distance. The distance from his chair to the kettle. The distance from his bed to the toilet at three in the morning. The distance from the front door to the bin, which involves seven steps down and, in his case, a full minute of concentration in each direction. Short distances inside the home are his whole criterion, and once he had named it, a great many things clarified themselves at once. A beautiful house with a bathroom on the first floor is, for him, a bad house, no matter how beautiful. He is not against stairs on principle. He is against a life in which each cup of tea costs him a negotiation with his knee.

The Carters, who are in their late sixties and have been married for forty years, did the exercise separately at the kitchen table and then compared. This is the version to use if you are a couple, and I will come back to why. Their top cards overlapped on financial breathing room and diverged everywhere else. One of them put outdoor space first, and not a private garden either, but a shared one, with other people in it, which turned out to be the thing they had both been circling for a year without saying: they liked the idea of a place where there were other households close by, a shared bit of ground, someone to notice if the post piled up. Company came second on one list and sixth on the other. Peace and quiet came second on the other list and did not make the first list at all. Those two facts sitting side by side on the table did more for their planning than a year of vague evening conversations about maybe we should think about somewhere smaller.

None of these three sorts is more correct than the others. That is the point, and it is worth saying plainly, because the housing conversation is full of people who will tell you what a sensible person your age ought to want. A sensible person your age wants what you want. The card sort simply gets it out of your head and onto the table where you can look at it, argue with it, and use it.

The Three-Star List

Out of the ranked column, take the top three. Draw a star beside each. These are your non-negotiables, and they have a specific job: they are the criteria that give you permission to say no quickly.

Three is a deliberate number and it is deliberately uncomfortable. Everyone wants five. Some people try for seven and produce a list on which nothing can fail, which is the same as having no list at all. If everything is non-negotiable, then every option is unacceptable, and you will spend two years viewing places and rejecting them for reasons you cannot articulate, growing more tired and less decisive with each one. Three stars is enough to protect what genuinely matters and few enough to leave room for the compromises that any real decision involves.

Write your three stars as sentences, not as words. Safety is a word and it means nothing on a viewing. I must be able to get help within fifteen minutes at three in the morning is a sentence, and you can test any flat, any scheme and any adaptation against it in about ninety seconds. Family is a word. My son must be able to reach me in under an hour without changing trains is a sentence, and it draws an actual circle on an actual map. Mr Osei's three stars read: everything I use daily on one level; a toilet no more than twelve steps from my bed; a front door I can reach without carrying anything up a step. That is a specification. A builder could work from it. So could an estate agent, if you handed it to one, and I would encourage you to do exactly that when the time comes.

Then, when a leaflet arrives, or a friend recommends somewhere, or a family member sends you a link, you have a fast and dignified answer. Not I don't know, I'll think about it, which invites a second and third conversation on the same topic. Something firmer: Rosewood Court fails my second star, because the nearest bus into town runs twice a day and I would lose my Thursday choir. That is a reason. Reasons end arguments. Vagueness prolongs them, and prolonged vagueness is how people end up being moved rather than moving.

Wishes and fears are not the same thing

Now for the part of this work that most needs care. When people first write down what they want from a home, roughly half of what appears on the paper is not a wish at all. It is a fear wearing a wish's coat.

The two feel similar from the inside and behave completely differently in practice. A wish pulls you towards something. A fear pushes you away from something, and a push tells you only where you do not want to be, which leaves an enormous number of directions open, most of them wrong. I don't want to be a burden is a fear. It is one of the most common sentences in this entire subject, and as a decision criterion it is close to useless, because it does not say what a good life would look like. It only says what a bad one would. Worse, it tends to produce decisions made too early and too drastically, because giving up more than necessary feels like the safest possible protection against being a burden, right up until the moment you are sitting in a smaller flat in an unfamiliar town wondering what happened.

So do a translation exercise. Take a sheet of paper, fold it down the middle, and on the left write every fear-shaped sentence in your head, in its ugly original form. Nobody else has to read this page. I'm afraid of falling and lying there. I'm afraid the children will put me somewhere. I'm afraid of the stairs in winter. I'm afraid of ending up alone in a room full of strangers. Write them badly and honestly. Then, on the right, turn each one into a statement of what you want instead, phrased in the positive and made concrete.

I'm afraid of falling and lying there becomes: I want a reliable way of calling for help from the bathroom floor, and I want someone to notice within a few hours if I haven't been in touch. Now it is a criterion. It can be met in several different ways, some of which cost very little, and we work through them in Chapter 8. I'm afraid the children will put me somewhere becomes: I want to make the decision myself, in good time, and I want my family to know my reasoning before anything happens. That one leads directly to Chapter 16, on family conversations and documents, and it is achievable. Entirely achievable, in fact, and mostly by talking earlier than feels comfortable.

The fears do not disappear during this exercise. That is not the aim, and any book promising you a fear-free old age is selling something. What changes is that a fear which has been turned into a stated wish becomes a thing you can work on. It moves from the middle of the night into the middle of the afternoon, where tools exist. And a small number of the fears, once written on the left-hand side of the page, turn out to be borrowed rather than yours: absorbed from a newspaper story, or from what happened to a colleague's mother in 1998 under circumstances that have almost nothing to do with your life. Those you can cross out.

A short self-test on your ordinary week

Values are one half of the picture. The other half is what your days actually contain, and here memory is a poor witness. We remember the exceptional and forget the routine, which is unfortunate, because the routine is what a home has to support.

For one week, keep a small notebook by the kettle and note the things that cost you effort. Not pain, necessarily, and nothing dramatic. Effort. The moment you paused. The task you put off until tomorrow for the third time. The thing you now do in two trips that you used to do in one. Write the time of day beside it, because time of day matters more than people expect: the same staircase is a different staircase at seven in the morning than at three in the afternoon.

At the end of the week, look for patterns rather than incidents. A single awkward morning tells you nothing. The same awkward moment appearing five times in seven days is information. Ask yourself what a stranger would conclude about your home from your notebook. If half the entries involve carrying something upstairs, your home has told you something about stairs. If most entries cluster after dark, the honest reading is about lighting, and Chapter 7 has a plan for that. If the notebook is almost empty but you have written couldn't be bothered to go out four times, then your issue is not the building at all, and Chapter 9, on neighbourhood and connection, matters more for you than the whole of the adaptation section.

Two further questions are worth asking at the end of the week, and they are best asked in writing, because writing catches the answers that speech smooths over. First: which parts of this week did I enjoy, and what did my home contribute to them? People plan housing entirely around problems and then wonder why the result feels joyless. If your best hour of the week was reading in the window seat with the afternoon sun on the page, then good light and a place to sit in it belong on your criteria list alongside the grab rails. Second: what did I do this week that I would find difficult if I lost a bit more strength, or if my eyes got worse, or if I could no longer drive? That is not a morbid question. It is the same question a sensible person asks about a car before a long journey, and it is asked in exactly the same spirit.

Today, and in ten years

Take your ranked list and copy it out twice, side by side, with two headings: today and in ten years. Then rank the second column as if you were ten years older, with rather less energy and rather more need for things to be within reach. Do not catastrophise. You are not imagining the worst case, you are imagining the ordinary case, which is a slow, gentle narrowing of range that most people experience and most people manage perfectly well.

The interesting part is where the two columns disagree. For many people, being in the middle of things rises sharply in the second column, because the ability to reach a shop on foot matters far more once driving becomes tiring or stops altogether. Peace and quiet often falls, because a very quiet place is also a place where nothing passes your window and nobody knocks. Outdoor space frequently splits into two different cards: people discover they want to be near green space far more than they want to maintain it, which is a distinction with real consequences, since one is a location decision and the other is a lawnmower decision.

Mrs Berger's two columns were almost identical, which is itself a finding. Familiarity stayed at the top in both, and that told her the adapt-or-move question was, for her, mostly a question about whether her particular flat could be made to work. Mr Osei's columns diverged more than he liked. In the ten-year column, closeness to family jumped from seventh to third, and when he sat with that for a while, he admitted he had been avoiding the thought. He lives in a beautiful house on a hillside forty minutes from his nearest relative. In Chapter 9 he maps his neighbourhood properly and finds something about that hillside in winter that changes his thinking considerably. But the seed of it was already in his second column, on a Thursday afternoon, in pencil.

If you are doing this with a partner

Sort separately. Compare afterwards. Do not sit down together with one set of cards and produce one shared list, because what emerges will be a compromise before anyone has said what they actually want, and compromises made in silence tend to unravel later at bad moments.

When you compare, resist the urge to resolve the differences immediately. Just look at them. In most couples, two or three cards will be strikingly far apart, and those cards are the real agenda for the coming months. The Carters differed by four places on company, which is a large gap, and once it was visible they could talk about it as a fact about the two of them rather than as an accusation. The conversation they had was not about who was right. It was about whether a housing arrangement exists in which one of them gets more contact and the other gets more retreat, which is precisely what the community-living models in Chapter 11 attempt to provide, with a private front door on one side of the wall and a common house on the other.

One thing to watch for: if one partner has a health condition and the other does not, the healthy partner's criteria have a way of quietly vanishing from the conversation. Everybody focuses on the person with the diagnosis, and the other one, who will be doing the shopping and the caring and the driving, ends up with no stated needs at all. That arrangement holds for a while and then it breaks. Both lists count. Both people are going to live there.

Four ways this exercise goes wrong

The first and most common failure is borrowing. A friend moved into a retirement flat and is delighted, so a retirement flat goes on your list, although your friend's chief pleasure is the bridge club on Tuesdays and you have never played bridge in your life. Adopt other people's questions freely. Be slower to adopt their answers.

Second: the sensible answer. Some people fill in the cards the way they would fill in a form for an official, producing a tidy, reasonable, virtuous list with safety on top and nothing on it that anyone could object to. Then they look at it and feel nothing. If your list does not contain at least one item that would slightly embarrass you to read aloud, sort again. The keeping of a cat that nobody else likes, the refusal to leave a particular view, the workshop full of tools you have not used in three years and will not give up: these belong on the list. They are what makes it yours.

Third: starting with money. Budget is real and Chapter 13 takes it seriously, with a ten-year method rather than a wishful one. But if the first question is what can I afford, the criteria quietly rearrange themselves to fit the answer, and you will never find out what you were actually aiming at. Establish the aim first. Then let the money conversation tell you how much of it is reachable, and in what order, and with what help. Sometimes the answer is more than expected, because the cheapest solution to a well-defined problem is often surprisingly small. A criterion of short distances inside the home can be met by a stairlift, or by moving the bedroom downstairs, and those two things differ in price by a very large factor.

Fourth: letting the vocabulary do your thinking. The housing market has its own language, and it is a persuasive one. Sheltered, supported, independent living, extra care, assisted: these terms sound like a ladder of increasing help, and in practice they are used inconsistently, sometimes within the same town, and their meaning varies considerably between countries. Chapter 10 untangles them properly. For now, the discipline is simple: when you read a brochure, translate every phrase into your own criteria before you form an opinion. A vibrant community atmosphere may mean daily company or it may mean an activities timetable on a noticeboard that three people attend. Your card sort tells you which of those you were hoping for.

Why deciding early makes you freer

There is a belief, and it is held sincerely, that thinking about later life brings it closer. That planning for frailty invites it in. I understand the feeling, and I want to argue against it, because it costs people a great deal.

Consider the two ways this decision usually gets made. In the first, it is made on an ordinary afternoon, in your own kitchen, by you, with a list in front of you, over a period of months, with time to change your mind twice and to visit three places before choosing. In the second, it is made on a Thursday at four in the afternoon in a hospital corridor, by a discharge coordinator with eleven other patients waiting, in consultation with a daughter who has driven ninety minutes, who is frightened, who has no idea what her mother would want because they never discussed it, and who has until Monday to arrange something. Both are real decisions. Only one of them is yours.

Everything in this book is designed to move you towards the first version. Not because a crisis can be prevented (some can be made less likely, and Chapter 7 addresses that soberly, but the honest position is that some cannot), and not because planning removes uncertainty. Because a person who has already thought it through has options in the corridor. She has a list. She has a folder. She has said the words if anything happens, I want to try coming home first, with help in the mornings, and I have already looked into what that costs to someone who remembers her saying it. Chapter 16 shows how to have that conversation and what to write down. Those preparations do not make the crisis pleasant. They make it survivable on your own terms, and the difference is enormous.

There is a second freedom in it too, quieter and easier to overlook. Once you have decided what you are aiming at, you can stop worrying at it. Mrs Berger had spent eight months in a low, background state of unease every time the subject came near her: a leaflet, a comment at lunch, a piece on the radio about care homes. After the card sort she had a sentence. I want to stay in this street, and I'm willing to spend money and accept some inconvenience to do it. The unease did not vanish, but it stopped being formless. When her daughter next raised the subject, she did not deflect it and she did not get defensive. She said what she wanted and what she was prepared to trade for it, and the conversation, which they had both been dreading in slightly different ways, took eleven minutes and ended with them looking at bathroom photographs together.

What to write down before you turn the page

Give yourself one sheet of paper and title it with the date, because you will want to compare it against the version you write next year. Chapter 18 makes that annual review a fixed appointment rather than a good intention.

On the sheet, in this order: your ranked criteria, from the card sort, with the ten cards in the order you put them. Your three stars, each written as a full sentence, specific enough that a stranger could test a property against it. A short second column showing how the ranking shifts when you look ten years ahead, with a note beside any card that moves more than two places. And below that, three or four lines from your notebook week, describing the moments that cost you effort and the moments that gave you pleasure, because both are instructions to your home.

That sheet is your compass, and it is worth saying exactly how it will be used, so that it does not become another well-meant document in a drawer. In Chapter 2 you will walk through your home with it and ask, room by room, whether this building can deliver these criteria. In Chapters 3 to 8 you will decide which adaptations earn their place, and the ones that serve a starred criterion go to the front of the queue. In Chapter 9 you will hold it up against your street, and in Chapters 10 and 11 against the various forms of housing that exist beyond your front door. In Chapter 12, where the adapt-or-move decision finally gets made, the criteria on this sheet become the rows of the decision matrix, and the ranking you did on a Thursday afternoon becomes the weighting. In Chapter 17 you will take it with you to viewings, physically, in your bag, because the pleasant smell of fresh coffee in a show flat has been known to reorder people's priorities for the duration of a visit.

Keep it visible for a fortnight before you consider it final. Priorities settle. You will move a card, probably two, and you may discover that something you ranked fourth is genuinely first and that you knew it all along. That is the exercise working, not failing.

And then the work turns outward, to the building you are sitting in. Every criterion on your sheet is a promise you are asking a home to keep, and the next question is whether your current home can keep them, honestly assessed, room by room, with the front door as the starting point and nothing skipped because it is inconvenient to look at.

Kapitel 2: An Honest Look Around: Assessing Your Current Home

When did you last look at your own hallway? Not glance down it on the way to the door. Look at it, the way a stranger would on a first visit, noticing the coat hooks and the height of the step and the fact that the light switch is behind the door when you come in with shopping in both hands. Most of us stopped seeing our homes years ago. This is not carelessness. It is how the brain works, and mostly it works in our favour: you can find the bathroom in the dark because your body knows the route without consulting you. The cost of that efficiency is invisibility. The threshold you have stepped over four times a day for eighteen years has become part of you rather than part of the building, and you will not notice it until the day your foot catches. So the work of this chapter is a deliberate act of unseeing. You are going to walk through your own home with a pen, a notepad and your criteria sheet from Chapter 1, and you are going to write down what is actually there. Not what should be there. Not what was fine in 2009. What is there now, measured where measurement helps, described honestly where it does not. Before we start, one thing needs saying, because it decides whether this exercise feels useful or humiliating. An audit is not a verdict on your housekeeping, your judgement or your standard of living. Every home in the world would fail some version of this survey. The house I am sitting in has a step down into the kitchen that has been there for two hundred years and is not going anywhere. A survey finding is simply a fact about a building, written down, so …