Moving

I’m sorry that I didn’t write anything last week. I was very busy with the task that is the subject of this week’s article. We moved my parents from their loverly golf course home of the past 15 years into a senior living facility.

I believe that my parents waited too long. My mother is 89 and my father is 98. We’ve been encouraging this move for several years. My father didn’t want to do it because he was effectively living in an assisted living facility with my mother being his cook, nurse, and general caretaker. That was a role that slowly overwhelmed her, but she didn’t agree to move until she was desperate.

There is a surprising amount of symmetry to life. When you are a baby, you can do nothing for yourself aside from complaining when your needs aren’t met. As you grow, you gain mobility. You learn how to function in your world. You learn how to predict the consequences of your actions and inactions. Then you get old and the process starts to reverse. Getting around becomes harder. Things that you used to seem simple become a struggle to understand. And as your mobility and reasoning power fade, your control over your life diminishes.

This reduction in agency robs you of your ability to make your own decisions. If you have people who love you, they’ll step in and try to make good decisions on your behalf, but it’ll never be the same as making your own decisions. That’s why I say that they waited too long. If they had made this move 5 years ago, they could have made their own decisions about this process. As it is, most of the major decisions were made for my parents rather than by my parents.

There were some decisions that they were unwilling to make for themselves. At 98 years old, my father was still a licensed driver regularly cruising out to the bank, the bakery, or the grocery store. He needed my mother with him so that he could find his way home, but he was very confident in his driving skills. He learned to drive 80 years prior on the island of Iwo Jima under less-than-ideal circumstances, but during those 80 years, he had never caused an accident. I tried to explain to him that, if everything went according to plan, his driving was still great, but that at his age he could no longer react quickly enough to the unexpected. Setting aside the diminished reaction time of his 98-year-old body, his mind couldn’t process unexpected information quickly enough for him to be a safe driver.

The lesson I learned from watching him is to arrange my life so that I no longer need to drive past my early 80s or when my children tell me to hang up my keys. It’s not easy in our car-centric world. Hopefully, self-driving cars will be a reality by then. If not, I’ll at least have the ability to use ride-sharing apps when I truly need a car, but I’d at least like the ability to walk to the grocery store.

While I think they were late in making their decision to move, I’m glad that they finally made it. Moving them was a big project. Maybe working with project managers for decades rubbed off on me, but the first thing we did was put together an organized list of tasks. By the time we were done, we had more than 100 separate tasks in three major sections (Preparation, Transition, and Post-Move Actions). Each of those was broken into further groups, like Important Conversations, Planning the Physical Move, Changing Addresses, Ending Contracts, and more. If anyone wants a copy of our list to use as a starting point for their own list, let me know and I’ll send it to you.

It wasn’t just the move step plan that got a list. My brother and his wife created an inventory to help document what was to be moved, given away, or sold. We had another list of people who needed a change of address - every one of my dad’s dozen magazines, the bank, his broker, Social Security, and more. There were about 40 entries on that list. If you need to make a list like that, the best place to start is by looking back through bank and credit card records to see who gets paid. Then look through your contact list (or phonebook if you’re from the pre-cell phone generation). Finally, we built a list of every TV show my father was recording on his DVR. He spends a lot of his time watching TV and we wanted that change to be as seamless as possible. The lists are also a good place to keep track of what hasn’t been started, what is in progress, and what has been completed.

Some companies were really easy to work with. My parents had paid Lawn Doctor in December for the upcoming year. A quick phone call to them resulted in them refunding the entire amount without complaint. DirecTV was similarly easy to cancel.

CenturyLink can rot in hell. You can’t cancel online because that would be too easy. You have to call a special phone number and wait on hold (with no choice for them to call you back and no indication of how many hours you’ll be on hold). I thought I could short-circuit their process by driving to one of their local offices, but the two locations that I found on Google Maps (where they had a perfect 1-star rating) didn’t actually exist. Or maybe they did, but they were in the Stranger Things upside-down world or something. I saw no evidence of them at all. Instead, I just plugged in my phone, called their badly supported phone number, left my phone on speaker, and went about my business until they finally answered. Even then, it was a frustrating conversation. Because we were in the process of transferring my parents’ home phone (a process that took 9 days during which you cannot get any status updates), they insisted that I couldn’t cancel their Internet and that I would have to wait until the phone was canceled and then try again. I opted to pursue the “angry old man” strategy and eventually got a supervisor to agree that they could indeed put in an order to cancel the Internet. I know that Jesus promised that He’ll forgive anyone, but I think these people are really pushing it.

Citibank also deserves a dishonorable mention. All I wanted to do was change the address. I made this call before I learned to lie and claim to be my father. As a result, the representative (who spoke English so poorly that I could barely understand him) insisted that he needed to speak to my mother, who is practically deaf. We somehow muddled through the change of address part and I thought we were done. But no! Citibank doesn’t want their reps to miss a chance to sell their customers something new. The rep, undeterred by the fact that a simple change of address had taken 15 minutes of confused shouting, now tried to convince me that I wanted some incomprehensible new product that wouldn’t cost me anything at all. Or maybe he said it was something I couldn’t get at the mall. I had no idea what he was saying or why he was trying to drag out this horrible experience. I finally shouted that I had to go and hung up on him. I hate talking on the phone and this experience only reinforced my disdain.

The move itself went fairly well. I drove them down the night before the movers arrived and my brother and his wife put them up in a 2-room hotel suite. The movers were fast and efficient (helped by the fact that my brother, his wife, and my wife had packed all of the loose items). I thought we would have the place ready for my parents to spend the night, but it didn’t work out. I missed a crucial piece of the bedframe during the packing. It’s just as well because the day was stressful enough for my parents that spending another night at the hotel was probably a better idea anyway.

Kathy and I stayed at my parents’ old house for the next several days. Aside from the dresser, the guest bedroom was still intact, so that part wasn’t much different. The rest of the house felt strange. The house had that haunting quality of a place you know well that is no longer the same place. Walking around brought back a lot of memories - memories of Christmas there with our boys, big family dinners around the table, the games we played together, and time with my sister, Yvette, who we lost a few years ago. The memories had that bitter-sweet quality. They were memories of great times that I treasure but know that I’ll never experience again.

The hardest part for me was when I was cleaning out the basement. I found boxes and boxes of pictures - photo albums, negatives, films, video tapes. Anyone who knows me well knows that my collection of photos and videos is my most valuable possession. They are my treasure. To see my parent’s collection sitting in boxes was a tough blow. I started going through the boxes trying to figure out what to keep and what to part with. Eventually, I decided to just keep everything. Most of the boxes in the picture above are filled with photos, videos, and films. I think I’ll be digitizing these for years, but I’d hate to see them just go away. Maybe I’ve seen the movie Coco too many times.

Many years ago, I digitized their old 8mm films. It was a complicated process. You could just point a video camera at a screen and project the movies onto the screen, but that leads to a flickery image with low contrast. Instead, I got a special telecine projector that allowed you to take a picture of each individual frame. Then I combined those images into videos. I wanted to sit down with my parents and record narration about the people and places in the videos, but I had waited too long and they no longer remembered much of it. Perhaps my sister, Terry, and I can go through them this summer and do the best that we can.

Part of my haul was sixty-five 8mm video cassettes from the 80s and 90s. These included my wedding and each of my sibling’s weddings, precious moments with Yvette, and much more. Videotape doesn’t last forever, so I’ve been quickly digitizing the tapes. It may take me years to edit them, but at least I’ll have them. I created a YouTube channel called Barbieri Family History where I can start to upload the old films and converted video tapes. If I can teach my father how to access them on his TV, he can relive some of those times from his past.

As my parents have aged, Kathy and I have observed and discussed what we will do. Some are things that we’ll do differently, like avoiding being dependent on driving in our late 80s. Don’t wait too long to move to a place where younger people can care for you. Or maybe hire a younger person to care for you at home. If you have trustworthy kids, trust them. Listen when they tell you its time to give up your keys or your home. Some are things that my parents did very well that we will emulate, like traveling as much and as long as possible. Live near at least one of your children because nobody will look after you like someone who remembers you looking after them.

Their new home is a nice place. It helps to have enough money when you are old to pay for a nice place. The people there are friendly. The staff is friendly and helpful. The restaurant is nice and serves pizza every day. There are activities and presentations almost every day. They are next door to the library and across the street from the performing arts center. It’s almost like living on a cruise ship that is permanently at dock. When I eventually move to a senior living facility, I’d like to do it on my terms rather than waiting so long that other people have to make the important decisions for me. Or maybe we’ll skip the senior center and move to a first-floor apartment in Italy between a grocery and a pizzeria and we’ll have someone help us get on the train to Switzerland from time to time so we can get some chocolate and watch cow parades.