The concept of helping people stay in their communities as they get older is a popular and growing movement here in the U.S. But there are added challenges for those who live, say, on an island off the coast of Maine. One island community is taking steps to respond.
For all of her 87 years, Harriet Pendleton has lived on the island of North Haven in the mouth of Penobscot Bay. She’s fiercely independent, but some tasks are particularly difficult.
“Having to get up and go the mainland for appointments,” she says with a laugh. “Otherwise I like it. I have to get up early to get washed up and dressed and all that.”
The day is a long one. An upcoming appointment to see an eye doctor, Pendleton says, will take an entire day.
“I do have to go a week from today because I have to have one of my eyes operated on for cataracts,” she says. “We have to go to Portland. The doctor wants to see me first and then I’ll get an appointment to have it done.”
So that’s two trips. Pendleton doesn’t like to shower without anyone in the house, in case she falls. With the help of an outreach worker, she’ll take the 70-minute ferry ride to Rockland, and then it’s a two-hour drive to Portland.
It’s tiring.
“It is,” Pendleton agrees. “Especially if we have to take the last ferry.”
And if the doctor runs late? She says she’d probably just leave the doctor’s office rather than risk missing that last ferry.
But that’s island life. And while it can be challenging, Hannah Pingree of North Haven Sustainable Living says older residents shouldn’t be forced to give it up.
“If you’ve spent your entire life in such an isolated community, it’s even more important that you stay in that familiar place for the last couple years of your life,” she says.
Pingree’s organization is developing what’s called an Adult Family Care Home on North Haven in an old Victorian house donated by a summer resident of the island. It won’t be a nursing home, capable of providing care for chronic or acute conditions, but there will be certified nursing assistants on duty 24 hours a day.
The idea is to create a haven for older islanders who would otherwise be stranded ashore. Not just to meet the medical needs of the residents, but their social and creative needs as well.
“The greatest struggle when you get to a nursing home is creating a meaningful life,” says Robert Jenkens, the former director of the Green House Project, an initiative that helps nursing homes and assisted-living providers implement, in his words, “a radically different approach to long-term care.”
Nursing homes are institutions, he says, and that’s just how they’re organized.
“If you like to cook, you can’t cook. If you like to go outside and garden, you can’t go outside and garden,” Jenkens says. “If you had a dog, you can’t have a dog.”
But the home planned for North Haven will upend the strict emphasis on safety and health alone.
“The small house that they will develop with the open kitchen, with the private rooms, with direct relationships with the caregivers, and the caregivers who are consistently available so that relationship can occur, will really put North Haven ahead of probably 95 percent of the communities in the United States,” he says.
The new home will have six beds, and Pendleton says she’s ready to move in. A capital campaign is underway for the endowment of the home, and she could be able to apply sometime next year.
North Haven Sustainable Housing and Southern Harbor Eldercare Services are hosting a conference, “Aging on Islands,” this weekend at the Waterman’s Community Center on North Haven.