My mother Kay Jones is on the verge of moving out of the house I grew up in. She's found a new senior living facility which opens this summer and has already picked out her new apartment. She's enlisted the help of her four daughters, including me, to start the process of downsizing, and going through more than 40 years of stuff, including 48 photo albums.
As we learned in our first installment of this series, it's important to talk about the decision to move before a crisis hits. My mom's in pretty good shape, both physically and mentally, and she is making the decision herself.
Still though, as far as the move, she's been on the fence, feeling slightly apprehensive.
"It's been a difficult decision because you have the memories of 47 years of raising your family and all the things that have gone on during those years," she said.
The decision to move out of the family home is emotional.
"It's completely overwhelming and paralyzing for seniors," said Jill Freeman, with Gentle Transitions, a senior move management company with decades of experience. "They've been in their house for 30, 40, 50 even 60 years. They are comfortable where they are. They have things in places that they haven't looked in for a long time."
In Gentle Transitions, each client is assigned a move manager, which Freeman likened to a wedding planner
"They help them with the packing, the unpacking, the floor plan, and then resettling, putting everything in its place," Freeman said.
The manager also helps the client decide which items will be moved to the new place, and which ones will not.
That can be hard.
"It's the physical piece and it's number one, the emotional piece. It's not only the attachment to the items and memories they don't want to lose, it’s that they think they have to hold onto them because no one else wants the items."
Sometimes, wrestling with these decisions can keep people from moving.
Freeman says there are some questions to ask yourself though in deciding what stays and what goes, keeping in mind your new lifestyle.
"Will you do your own cooking? Is that going to change? Do you do your own cleaning? You need to sit down and think about things ahead of time, because that's the first chance you can begin to distance yourself from those items," she said.
Even knowing this, it's been tough going through items at my mom's house. We'd look at an item, and she would launch into a story about that particular piece and the time in her life she associated it with.
In the kitchen, for instance, there was a plate on the wall she had purchased during a trip to Mexico City — it showed an image of campesino holding a basket. She had traveled there with her late husband, my father, who passed away in 2005 after a struggle with cancer. They had been married for 43 years. She teared up as she recalled their time together.
Freeman says for adult children, it's important to be sensitive and patient during this process.
“When you open up the cupboard and see the Thanksgiving platter, and you think that it has wonderful memories and you want to keep it, but we've already decided you won't be hosting the holiday anymore, that can be hard to come to terms with," she said.
It can be exhausting, and one of the biggest challenges people face is going through photo albums.
Freeman has this advice:
"Throw everything away that's landscape or people you don't know. And don't put them back into photo albums because it's likely your kids will digitize them."
Finally, once you've decided what will go with you, the folks at Gentle Transitions will move your things, taking care to make the new place feel just like home.
"If you have that chair you watch the news in, next to the table with the lamp that you can turn on without looking, it keeps your blood pressure down. It makes it less overwhelming."
The cost of the move varies from three to 12 thousand dollars, depending on the size of the house and the amount of stuff you have. Other companies, like Senior Moves and Rose's Daughter, offer similar services.