New Models for Aging as Women

It began as a joke. My friend Emily, who lives near my desert house in California, and I started quipping about the “feminist retirement commune” we would someday form in our old age. “Rob’s the only man allowed,” Emily said of my husband. We laughed…but the idea had resonance.

In the United States, women outlive men by about 6 years; globally, the average is 7 years. Despite cultural hysteria pushing women to marry lest they “die alone,” it is not only single or divorced women likely to spend the final years of their lives unpartnered, but widows. Yet, for a society that so prioritizes nuclear family and marriage, we’ve done shockingly little to address quality of life issues for those in their last decade, women especially.

According to data reported by the aptly named A Place for Mom, “Of seniors aged 65 and over, 70 percent of men are married compared to just 48 percent of women. The most up-to-date research indicates that nearly 70 percent of female nursing home residents are either widowed, divorced, or never married.” The National Library of Medicine likewise reports that “Approximately 75 percent of all married men aged 50 and over are married to women who are more than one year younger… In contrast, the majority of married women (65 percent) aged 50 years and over are married to men who are older.”

This scenario is all too familiar to me. My maternal grandmother’s older husband died when I was nine, whereas she lived for several more decades. She spent most of those years living alone in the apartment above my parents and me, before ending up in assisted living. (More than 1.3 million elderly adults in the U.S. live in nursing homes—a number expected to increase drastically as our population ages.)

Although my nana was highly independent and enjoyed her own company, I will never forget how she took to cuddling stuffed animals towards the end of her life—an act deeply uncharacteristic of the woman I’d always known—referring to them as “my babies,” so starved she had become for affection and company. My mother and her sister did the best they could, but both had full-time jobs and children, and my mother, who didn’t know how to drive, could only visit once a week. Later, when my mother outlived my father by four years, she, too, fell into isolation despite remaining in their longtime apartment with my children and me living above her. The kids had school, friends, activities; I was working more than full-time, going through cancer treatments, a divorce, a temporary disability that left me in chronic pain and with restricted mobility, and starting a live-in partnership with my now-husband, in addition to full-throttle parenting. While my mother and I had once spent so much time together with my kids that we were nearly like co-parents, as she grew housebound, the kids and I had less time to devote to keeping her company, a painful regret I still turn over in my head.

Likewise, my paternal grandmother, who died when I was 11, outlived her husband (who died before I was even born) and spent the last decades of her life alone in her apartment, then in a nursing home when she could no longer remember things like turning off the stove and became a danger to herself. All three of these women had done things the “conventional” way—married, raised children, centered family. Yet all three met with lonely final years, even amidst relatives who loved them.

As Emily and I continued sending our “feminist retirement commune!” texts to one another, meanwhile, 2,000 miles away in Chicago, my husband’s and my four-person band (the very-aging-rockers-named “Hitchcock Brunettes”) began a similar conversation that also started jokingly and quickly turned serious. We should buy some land, we fantasized—the four of us and the other two members’ wives—and each build a house on it, living close, sharing resources, helping each other while still maintaining the autonomy of our own dwellings. Unlike Emily’s and my feminist retirement commune, they didn’t mean in 20 years but rather in the next five to eight years, as soon as no one was tied to an office. We began perusing the internet for locations close to good hospitals, rated as desirable locations amidst climate change, and even shared the idea with our children, who seemed delighted—perhaps because they imagined fun visits to “The Compound” with their own future families, and perhaps because they imagined a way out of what they watched me endure in caretaking my parents for 15 years as it wore me into the ground.

Turns out, all this talk is part of an international zeitgeist. From a group of six friends in Australia to The AARP’s The Ethel’s “Why You Should Consider Living With Friends in Retirement,” there has been a rash of interest in alternative models of aging. Why live among strangers, paying institutions (via Medicaid or out of pocket) to care for us in sterile, unfamiliar rooms, rather than among self-selected communities of chosen family? I can even imagine how a plot of land tended by a group of (mainly) married couples in one’s sixties might evolve—given the stats—into a so-called “feminist retirement commune,” with some woman’s surviving husband as the token man, pooling resources for outside help, by one’s 80s.

“Getting old is a kick in the ass, honey,” my father always said. He knew: the youngest of seven brothers, he survived them all and every friend of his youth. And the recent devastating death of one of my best friends, at only 56, reminded me that even on a utopian compound, someone would inevitably be the last one standing; there is no outrunning mortality and loss. But in the meanwhile, if we stand toe-to-toe, we can find templates that also make growing older an adventure for as long as possible, alongside our closest friends. From what I hear (usually while my band cracks up), I’m going to be in charge of the goats!