A CCRC is essentially the equivalent of organic farming for elder care. It’s not quite a retirement community, nor is it exactly a nursing home either. Pioneered by the LifeCare Corporation in 1971, a CCRC is a vast self-contained campus, complete with housing options ranging from airy cottages to hotel-style apartments, dining facilities, and acres of nature-paths. Amenities rival those of a small city, if a small city was built entirely by AARP The Magazine: There are woodshops and pottery studios for hobbyists, simulcast operas and visiting professors for intellectuals, weekly get-togethers for social butterflies, language classes, dances, and independent lending libraries. Cafeteria menus are designed by executive chefs–even the inoffensive wall-art is made on premises.
But the more important function of a CCRC is to provide a comprehensive logistical answer to the end of life—a complete package deal, if you will. While most residents arrive as fully functional retirees with pastimes and furniture and plans for the future, they soon embark on the journey of medical services that will unavoidably define their penultimate years. This begins with occasional in-home nursing visits and progresses steadily through motorized wheelchairs and special diets, minor surgeries and regular physical therapy (strength training, aquarobics, neuromuscular re-education). At some point residents leave their homes for a central facility where rooms—or rather, apartments—are attended by a full-time staff of geriatric professionals. Eventually, they come to a building known as the skilled nursing annex, where doors are adorned with grandchildren’s cards and tiny dried flowers. Residents never exactly die; the community loses someone. Cottages are gut-renovated. Apartments get new paint, new carpet, new appliances. A new family arrives to vet floor plans and pricing options. To every season, etcetera, etcetera.
This year my mother turns sixty-six and my father seventy-one, marking the decennial anniversary of his botched heart-valve replacement surgery, a bottomless crisis resulting in a stroke that hobbled his left hand and foot, an aortic aneurysm, and a steady decrease in heart function every year. Average age of entry into a CCRC varies by location but is generally between seventy-eight and eighty-two, making my parents among the youngest of potential residents. This is a concession they are willing to make. Insurance providers will barely look at my father’s medical records, much less extend to him the kind of long-term coverage he’ll almost certainly need in the near future. Live-in care is out of my parents’ price range, and my mother is fifteen years off from an actual nursing home. Though I’d envisioned them in their later years buying a condo and hiring occasional help, I now understand that’s not an option, and I can’t say I blame them. A CCRC is the best solution to a problem that doesn’t actually have one.
No organization officially records the size of the CCRC industry. The non-profit Leading Age comes closest, estimating that nearly a million Americans live in two thousand such facilities. And I’ve agreed to go tour them, helping my parents over the course of a weeklong, three-state trip to choose the place where they will spend the remainder of their lives.
by John Fischer, Guernica | Read more:
Image courtesy Mark H. Anbinder
