How Canadians are navigating the complicated, onerous and emotional task of planning for aging | Canada Voices

Canada’s population is rapidly aging. The Globe and Mail’s Aging Well series explores the country’s longevity economy, how people are living healthier and happier lives as they age, and how to support older adults.

The house on the main street of the tiny village of Merrickville, Ont., was the seventh property that Charles Merredew toured.

It had large, mature fruit trees. A cedar hedge out front that he could build a private patio behind. Plenty of green space. Plus, it was right beside the canal.

“This house,” he said, “gave me a palette that I could work with.”

For most buyers, purchasing a home represents a new beginning. And for Mr. Merredew, choosing that house in Merrickville back in 2018 indeed represented a kind of fresh start. But for the now-64-year-old, it was the beginning of what he envisioned as his last chapter – the house he planned to grow old in.

His intention is to age in place, to spend the rest of his days here rather than a retirement residence. So, since moving in, he’s taken down walls to make the space easier to navigate for his future, presumably frailer self. He installed a higher toilet and lower countertops. He’s been attempting, quite literally, to design and build his own future.

“I’m trying,” he said, “to be pro-active rather than reactive.”

Across the country, families are undertaking their own versions of this project. Already, nearly one in five Canadians is over the age of 65, according to Statistics Canada. So from coast to coast, families of all shapes and sizes are navigating the complicated, onerous and, yes, emotionally fraught task of planning for aging.

The Globe spoke with a few of these families to understand how Canadians are planning for their own futures. Theirs are stories of give-and-take, and compromise. Stories of autonomy – about learning where it’s most important to have control, and where it’s okay to let go.

“Families are complicated. We know that. And oftentimes folks don’t like to talk about aging,” said Audrey Miller, a former social worker and now an eldercare planner based in Toronto. “What’s right for one family isn’t right for another.”

Mr. Merredew was still in his late 50s when he started shopping for his Merrickville home. He’d already retired a few years earlier. But still, he acknowledges that it’s likely uncommon for 50-somethings to already be planning for their final years.

Much of Mr. Merredew’s working life was spent in the Canadian military, and then, later, with the Corps of Commissionaires. That taught him rigour, and discipline – the need to always have a plan.

He suffered injuries in his time with the military, which made him hyper-aware of his own physicality and his own vulnerability. He’s also suffered several personal traumas. His daughter died in 2011. And in 2016, his wife died of cancer. He understands the inevitability of death, understands how little control any of us have in the last stages of life.

So for him, it’s important to plan early. “The idea of control,” he said, “resonates with me quite a bit.”

That’s how he came up with his age-in-place plan. With his wife and daughter gone, he knows he doesn’t have the same built-in support network that others might. And he doesn’t like the idea of assisted living.

“I wouldn’t do very well in a retirement residence,” he said. “Put it that way.”

Using a map, he drew a large circle of about a 120-kilometre diameter, with Ottawa at its centre. He wanted a home that allowed him to stay close to Ottawa, where he’s lived for the past few decades – and also close to the Laurentian Valley, where his mom and sister live. Otherwise, he was open to any small town near the water, and within walking distance to a grocery store, a post office and doctor’s offices.

He’s now in Year 6 of his renovations. Recently, Mr. Merredew said, he arranged for technicians to visit and provide quotes for an elevator system.

The kinds of changes he’s made are the ones that Ms. Miller advises to any of her clients choosing to age in place: considering accessibility – getting in and out of the house – ensuring good lighting, addressing potential tripping hazards, and installing accessories such as grab bars and hand-held shower heads.

He’s also built a community around him in Merrickville. He started a writers’ group, and hosts a regular reading series in the town. He’s found friends he can lean on.

But lately, Mr. Merredew is finding that his work on the house is slowing down. He’s getting tired more easily, and having to accept his own limitations – the limitations on how much he’ll really be able to control.

“It’s the old serenity prayer,” he said. He’ll accept the things he cannot change, and change what things he can. “And,” he added, “have the wisdom and the courage to know the difference.”

In the case of Shameem Walji’s family, there was never a plan.

About a decade ago, Ms. Walji’s grandmother fell and had to be moved into a nursing home. Not long after, her dad had a stroke. He, too, moved into a nursing home.

Suddenly, the Vancouver-based Ms. Walji, who was then just 30, found herself thrust into the role of caregiver, taking over much of the day-to-day planning for her elder relatives. She was doing their taxes, managing their banking and, of course, their health care.

“It was almost like I had to take over somebody else’s life,” she said.

Ms. Walji has two sisters, but they both have kids. She herself, meanwhile, does not have kids and runs an e-commerce business with her husband, which offers her a more flexible, work-from-home schedule. And so, much of the day-to-day responsibility falls on her.

Many seniors want to age in place, but few are prepared for the financial and emotional costs

Prior to all this happening, she said, theirs was a family that did not openly discuss aging. When her dad suffered his stroke, his will hadn’t been updated in years.

“They hadn’t talked to us about all of this,” she said. “I feel like if we’d had those chances to plan, we’d have been in a way better scenario.”

About a year-and-a-half ago, Ms. Walji’s mother (who was, until that point, living with one of Ms. Walji’s sisters) also suffered a fall. So she, too, had to move into a nursing home.

This time, at least, the family was better equipped. They had her documents in order, her power of attorney sorted. They had talked through her financial details – her risk tolerance for investments – and consolidated accounts where possible. They’d discussed the parents’ investment properties, and how they wanted Ms. Walji to manage them.

“The more pro-active,” she said, “the better.”

Still, there’s another aspect of planning that the Walji family is still figuring out: dividing up the workload. Her sisters do as much as they can. Still, Ms. Walji estimates that – between dealing with her parents’ day-to-day errands, taking her mom to medical appointments and managing their properties – she spends between one and two hours each day on caregiving.

It’s an issue that Ms. Miller says is common. Her advice for families is to ask for help, and to outsource whenever possible, even if it’s just hiring a meal delivery service.

“There’s so much guilt – we carry so much guilt,” she said. “And carers feel they need to do it all because it’s all on their shoulders.”

Just as with Mr. Merredew, the idea of control comes up often with Ms. Walji’s family. In their case, it’s the older parents having to learn to give up a little bit of control, and Ms. Walji learning to step into that control.

“It really boils down to what my parents want – despite what I may want for them,” she said. “Ultimately, I want my parents to know they can trust me.”

She’s also thinking ahead to her own future. She and her husband decided early on not to have children of their own.

“So now I’m thinking, like, ‘Well, who’s going to do all this for me when I get older?’”

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For decades, Tom Koch has been providing answers to families with questions exactly like that.

Mr. Koch spent much of his career as a gerontologist and writer, specializing in eldercare and aging. It’s work he began in the 1980s, while caring for his own father in the last years of his life. Mr. Koch wrote about that experience in the book Mirrored Lives: Aging Children and Elderly Parents.

Today, Mr. Koch himself is 76. “Now I find myself being the elder who has to take his own advice,” he said.

“Have I taken it? Grudgingly, yes.”

The key advice he’s always emphasized with families over the years mirrors that of Ms. Miller: to plan, plan and plan early. And to communicate those plans. Mr. Koch is not married. And, like Ms. Walji, he doesn’t have kids. So his plans, and discussions about those plans, have been with other loved ones, including close friends and colleagues, a niece and some cousins.

He talks openly with them about how he’d like to see his last days play out, who has power of attorney, who he’d like to see make medical decisions – and what he’d like to see happen to his legacy.

“You don’t have to be rich for this,” he said. Even if it’s as simple as leaving behind a piece of furniture, or art, letting your loved ones in on the plan makes everything easier in the long term.

“The more we talk and the more we accept the fact of fragility – and the need for change – the better off we and those we love will be,” he said.

For Mr. Koch, he made the decision four years ago to leave behind his two-storey home and life in Toronto for a ground-level condo in Vancouver. There, he figures the moderate climate, and the support network he’s built up from working as a professor at the University of British Columbia, will make for a friendlier environment in which to age.

“I didn’t want to leave,” he said, “but I thought it was necessary for me to leave before it became absolutely necessary.”

As his health needs have changed, too, over the years, he’s found ways to adapt. When his vision began failing, he stopped driving and rode the bus instead. He has spinal degenerative arthritis, which led him to start using a walker. He stopped cycling and sailing.

“With each one of these steps, things I used to do, I had to give up,” Mr. Koch said. “Each one has been a hard loss.”

But just because life as he’d lived it was ending, he emphasized, doesn’t mean that life has ended. Instead, he said, “you have to find a way to live in a different way.”

“Aging well,” he said, “is simply making the most of what you have, as long as you have it, and then accepting the changes as they come at any age.”

In Mr. Koch’s case, one of the losses he had to grieve was giving up karate and aikido. But from there, he found a new opportunity – a new way of living. Now, he’s taken up tai chi.

Over in Merrickville, Mr. Merredew, too, is still finding new opportunities.

He’d always wanted to build or renovate a house. But designing this house – designing his future in this house – has become so much more than just a project. It’s given him the opportunity to take up dry stone wall construction – painstakingly fitting together stones, piece by piece, to build up walls around the house. He also figured out how to move about 25 tonnes of earth to finally build that front patio.

“This house is giving me the opportunity to express myself,” he said. “It’s becoming like an artwork for me.”