Bringing the Family to the Rocks
Saturday, May 3rd, 2025: Problems & Solutions, Society.
Trapped in the City?
Some of my friends lost their parents years ago, and never became actively or intimately involved in their late-life care or affairs. Other friends envisioned their retirement as a liberation, hoping to escape the expensive, crowded city where they’d spent their professional lives to some scenic, idyllic rural paradise like the one I found nearly 20 years ago.
But if their parents were long-lived like mine, they might’ve then found themselves trapped in the city, caring for their parents instead of enjoying the freedom of their retirement. Their own health, fitness, or financial security may even begin to decline, eroding those dreams of an active life in a healthier location.
Eighteen months ago, when I found myself suddenly responsible for the care and affairs of my elderly mother and disabled brother, I faced two major obstacles. First, after decades of creative frustration and years of joint pain and arduous rehab, my quality of life now depended on having all my time free for creative work and wilderness exploration. I’d become desperately selfish.
And second, my family was 1,500 miles away.
Who Should Move?
When I told people I was helping my family, the immediate assumption was that I would move to be with them. But mother and brother were living in the center of Indianapolis, a sprawling metro area of nearly a million people, in a monotonously flat, highly developed landscape with neither mountains nor wilderness. An expensive place to live and a dangerous place to drive, with virtually no traffic enforcement, increasing lawlessness, and rising traffic fatalities. Over and over again, I had to explain that I’d spent years searching for this refuge far from crowds and traffic, where I could live cheaper, healthier, and closer to nature and wilderness. I couldn’t conceive of leaving that for a big city – especially in a flat landscape with no wilderness.
It’s common now for families to be geographically fragmented, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. If it was inconceivable to leave rural New Mexico to care for parents in a distant city, what were the options? For the first year and a half, the only option for me was constant travel, and I found myself spending more and more of my time back there, until last winter when I lived in Indianapolis most of the time. That was the breaking point for me – traveling and living in that crowded, expensive place, caring for my family instead of making art and hiking the wilderness, was destroying my physical and mental health and fitness.
Objections No Longer Valid
So I talked it over with mother and brother, and instead of the superficially easier option of moving me to them, we decided to move them to me. I thought this might be something for others to consider! Trapped in a crowded, expensive metro area caring for your parents and dreaming of some distant time when you can finally escape the city – what about the option of moving the whole family to a cheaper, healthier place?
The arguments against such a move are obvious. How could you subject your elderly parents to the shock of leaving their familiar environment for a strange place where they’d be surrounded by strangers? What about other family members, and friends, who’ll be left behind? What about the significant loss of healthcare resources in a rural region far from the vast resources of a metro area? And what about the cost of the move itself?
In my family’s case, moving became an option only gradually, as we all came to realize those were no longer valid objections. Mother and brother had become increasingly isolated and immobilized by disabilities, so they were no longer an active part of their urban environment and community. The frustration they were feeling made them more open to a move to a completely new environment which might offer new friends and experiences.
Yes, the healthcare resources here are extremely limited. But this is primarily a working class family community, and in that social class, family unity means more than advanced medical care or high-end services. That’s a value system we could all learn from. Our rural small town is far safer than the big city, and in the long run, occasional travel to the nearest city for specialist care is much cheaper and healthier than living there full-time.
Yes, the move is expensive, but the one-time costs are more than offset by the ongoing, long-term savings. Mom’s flight had an overnight in Phoenix, where a homeless man slept on the sidewalk across from our room – at the foot of a corporate bank tower – a reminder of the dehumanizing, inequitable urban environment we were leaving behind.
Move Already Paying Off
Our 98-year-old mother suffers from severe hearing impairment, hypertension, mild incontinence, chronic urinary infections, physical weakness, chronic anxiety, and mild memory loss. Onset of chronic UTIs last summer resulted in hospitalization, confinement to wheelchairs, and total loss of independence in care facilities. She finally began to recover from the UTIs last December, walking again and regaining memory and mental acuity.
Our solution was to fly her here with a hired nurse companion, to arrive at an “assisted living” facility which is like a funky motel, with meals and 24-hour aides to administer meds and do personal care and housekeeping. Her new room is bigger than the room she left in Indianapolis, with a private bath instead of the shared bath she had back there – and for half the monthly room and board.
Reclaiming Independence
The transition was hard on both me and our mother, and it continues to be hard as Mom struggles with her chronic anxiety and I struggle to find balance between helping her and meeting my own needs. But the long-term advantages are already clear to both of us. She loves her new caregivers. She actually has more access to care than in the big city, where resources have deteriorated since COVID. She has much more social interaction and a better diet than when she was living at home. She loves nature, and with me nearby to take her on outings, her quality of life is dramatically improving.
For our mom, losing her independence during the past year has been much harder than moving across the country. She hates to be so dependent on me, and it’s inspiring to see the ways in which she resists the process of aging and reclaims her independence whenever possible. She fights memory loss by capturing her experiences daily in a journal, and a couple of weeks ago she decided to get her hair dyed red – not like most older women, in an attempt to hide her gray hair and look younger, but to show she’s still a creative woman who can make her own decisions.
My brother, morbidly obese with a chronic leg injury, still drives but has become mostly confined to home, where he gets an aide twice a week, and his social life takes place online. I’m looking for a subsidized apartment for him, and we plan to use a “bariatric transport” company which will move him here in 24 hours of continuous travel in a specially equipped van.
Going to the Rocks
During recent years, as I’ve shared my hiking dispatches with our mother, she’s become obsessed with rock formations. She’s endlessly curious and wants to know what they’re made of and how they got that way. When I visit her, she always wants to “go to the rocks”. So on Friday, I took her on a picnic to a state park a 45-minute drive east of town – a spectacular place I still hadn’t seen myself in all the time I’ve been here.
Cowboys and Girls
On the way back, I decided to take a different route, up the river valley where I’d first fallen in love with this area, while staying with new friends at their hot springs “commune”.
That turned out to be a lucky decision, because rounding a bend in the road, we came upon a scene right out of the Old West: cowboys and girls riding hard down a hillside, driving cattle to a corral. There were between six and eight riders, most of them teenage boys and girls, led by adults. It happened so quickly, I had to make a U-turn and pull off the road just as they were finishing up out of sight, so my mom could get a glimpse and I could snap a crude photo.
Ranchhands on horseback is a sight you almost never see in these days of ATVs and UTVs, and we just happened to stumble upon it! A typical day in the Land of Enchantment.
Thanks for sharing Tim. So glad the family made the choice to go west. We just visited my brother in El Prado, near Taos, and loved NM. Good place to be. Stay in touch.
Best, Meg snd John
Max
Thanks for doing that and sharing it … so happy for Joan … we are sharing your story with my daughter who has been struggling / juggling with her mother’s aging issues (in portland oregon) while dealing with her own angst as a forest service wilderness manager’s ‘fork in the road’ angst in the white mountains of new hampshire. and we just returned from a family visit in Taos so have an appreciation for the magic of that place.
So happy you questioned what was best and arrived at this solution for yourself and for this next chapter of all your lives. Thank you for sharing, it’s good to know how happy Joan is to be with you and closer to nature.