She was there for a year before moving to NewBridge, and it was, she said, “No comparison. No comparison.” This was the opposite of Goffman’s asylum. Human beings, the pioneers were learning, have a need for both privacy and community, for flexible daily rhythms and patterns, and for the possibility of forming caring relationships with those around them. “Here it’s like living in my own home,” Makover said.
Around the corner, I met Anne Braveman, seventy-nine, and Rita Kahn, eighty-six, who told me they had gone to the movies the week before. It wasn’t some official, prearranged group outing. It was just two friends who decided they wanted to go see The King’s Speech on a Thursday night. Braveman put on a nice turquoise necklace, and Kahn put on some blush, blue eye shadow, and a new outfit. A nursing assistant had to agree to join them. Braveman was paralyzed from the waist down due to multiple sclerosis and got around by motorized wheelchair; Kahn was prone to falls and needed a walker. They had to pay the $15 fare for a wheelchair-accessible vehicle to take them. But it was possible for them to go. They were looking forward to watching Sex and the City on DVD next.
“Have you read Fifty Shades of Grey yet?” Kahn asked me, impishly.
I allowed, modestly, that I had not.
“I had never heard of chains and that stuff,” she said, marveling. Had I? she wanted to know.
I really didn’t want to answer that.
NewBridge allowed its residents to have pets but didn’t actively bring them in, the way Bill Thomas’s Eden Alternative had, and so animals hadn’t become a significant part of life there. But children had. NewBridge shared its grounds with a private school for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, and the two places had become deeply intertwined. Residents who didn’t need significant assistance worked as tutors and school librarians. When classes studied World War II, they met with veterans who gave firsthand accounts of what they were studying in their texts. Students came in and out of NewBridge daily, as well. The younger students held monthly events with the residents—art shows, holiday celebrations, or musical performances. Fifth and sixth graders had their fitness classes together with the residents. Middle schoolers were taught how to work with those who have dementia and took part in a buddy program with the nursing home residents. It was not unusual for children and residents to develop close individual relationships. One boy who befriended a resident with advanced Alzheimer’s was even asked to speak at the man’s funeral.
“Those little kids are charmers,” said Rita Kahn. Her relationship with the children was one of the two most gratifying parts of her days, she told me. The other was the classes she was able to take.
“The classes! The classes! I love the classes!” She took a current events class taught by one of the residents in independent living. When she learned that President Obama had not yet visited Israel as president, she fired off an e-mail to him.
“I really felt I had to tell this man to get off his bum and go to Israel stat.”
It seemed like this kind of place might be unaffordable. But these weren’t wealthy people. Rita Kahn had been a medical records administrator and her husband a high school guidance counselor. Anne Braveman had been a Massachusetts General Hospital nurse, and her husband was in the office supply business. Rhoda Makover used to be a bookkeeper and her husband a dry goods salesman. Financially, these people were no different from Lou Sanders. Indeed, 70 percent of NewBridge’s nursing home residents had depleted their savings and gone onto government assistance in order to pay for their stay.
NewBridge had been able to cultivate substantial philanthropic support through its close ties to the Jewish community, and that had been vital to its staying afloat. But less than an hour’s drive away, close to where Shelley and her husband lived, I visited a project that had nothing like NewBridge’s resources and nonetheless found ways to be just as transformative. Peter Sanborn Place was built in 1983 as a subsidized apartment building with seventy-three units for independent, low-income elderly people from the local community. Jacquie Carson, its director since 1996, hadn’t intended to create nursing-home-level care there. But, as her tenants aged, she felt that she had to find a way to accommodate them permanently if they wanted it—and want it they did.