“Get me out of here,” she said over and over again.
Wilson became interested in policy for the aged. When she graduated, she got a job working in senior services for the state of Washington. As the years passed, Jessie shifted through a series of nursing homes, near one or another of her children. She didn’t like a single one of those places. Meanwhile, Wilson got married, and her husband, a sociologist, encouraged her to continue with her schooling. She was accepted as a PhD student in gerontology at Portland State University in Oregon. When she told her mother she would be studying the science of aging, Jessie asked her a question that Wilson says changed her life: “Why don’t you do something to help people like me?”
“Her vision was simple,” Wilson wrote later.
She wanted a small place with a little kitchen and a bathroom. It would have her favorite things in it, including her cat, her unfinished projects, her Vicks VapoRub, a coffeepot, and cigarettes. There would be people to help her with the things she couldn’t do without help. In the imaginary place, she would be able to lock her door, control her heat, and have her own furniture. No one would make her get up, turn off her favorite soaps, or ruin her clothes. Nor could anyone throw out her “collection” of back issues and magazines and Goodwill treasures because they were a safety hazard. She could have privacy whenever she wanted, and no one could make her get dressed, take her medicine, or go to activities she did not like. She would be Jessie again, a person living in an apartment instead of a patient in a bed.
Wilson didn’t know what to do when her mother told her these things. Her mother’s desires seemed both reasonable and—according to the rules of the places she’d lived—impossible. Wilson felt badly for the nursing home staff, who worked hard taking care of her mother and were just doing what they were expected to do, and she felt guilty that she couldn’t do more herself. In graduate school, her mother’s uncomfortable question nagged at her. The more she studied and probed, the more convinced she became that nursing homes would not accept anything like what Jessie envisioned. The institutions were designed in every detail for the control of their residents. The fact that this design was supposed to be for their health and safety—for their benefit—made the places only that much more benighted and impervious to change. Wilson decided to try spelling out on paper an alternative that would let frail elderly people maintain as much control over their care as possible, instead of having to let their care control them.
The key word in her mind was home. Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don’t. This loss of freedom was what people like Lou Sanders and Wilson’s mother, Jessie, dreaded.
Wilson and her husband sat at their dining table and began sketching out the features of a new kind of home for the elderly, a place like the one her mother had pined for. Then they tried to get someone to build it and test whether it would work. They approached retirement communities and builders. None were interested. The ideas seemed impractical and absurd. So the couple decided to build the place on their own.