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86 Chapter 7 Community Without Walls Weaving a Web of Friendship In 1992, Vicky Bergman, then forty-eight, began to contemplate her future. She and her husband, Dick, had been helping out his parents, who were in their eighties and having a difficult time with illness and frailty. She and Dick began to wonder what their own old age would be like. after Dick’s father died, his mother grew increasingly depressed and lonely. “Mom fell apart after being a caregiver to Dad,” reflected Dick. his mother immediately moved in with Dick and Vicky, and six months later they found what they hoped would be a good situation for her, in a continuing care retirement community. But “she was never happy,” Dick said. Vicky and Dick took his parents’ experience to heart and thought about how they could make their own old age different. They knew they wanted to remain in their home in Princeton, New Jersey. They also were smart enough to realize that without forethought, they were at risk of ending up alone and isolated. The couple, more intentional than most, attended the Omega Institute Conference on Conscious aging in New York, along with another couple from Princeton. although they found the conference to be worthwhile, “We felt something was missing,” said Vicky. During this time, as she wrote later, they wrestled with their concerns— the fear of aging alone, the need for widening their friendship network when their longtime friends moved away or died, and the need for improving housing options and community infrastructure to meet the needs of older people in Princeton.1 to address these issues, the two couples, along with two other friends, decided to engage people they knew in a conversation about growing older. They sent out what became known as “the Falling Leaves letter” to their networks. The letter, an invitation to come to the Bergmans for coffee and conversation, began: With the start of the fall season many people think of a year coming to an end, and as we get older, there is frequently a bit of unease along with the falling leaves. Community Without Walls 87 What lies ahead? Will I be well enough to live as I do now and, if so, for how long? Is my family nearby? Do I have friends younger than I am? Will I be able to stay in my own home? Instead of just brushing these questions aside, a few of us got together to talk about a nurturing community of support—support that would allow us to stay in our own homes as long as we possibly could. Our experience with parents, other relatives, and friends, has brought the need to prepare for these pending problems into sharp focus. We think you might be one of the people or couples who would be interested in pursuing the possibility of creating a nurturing “community without walls.” The goal is to get rid of the fear and worry and to answer the quest of “who will be there for me?”2 They had hoped for a turnout of thirty or so, but twice that number crammed into the Bergman home, with participants ranging in age from forty-eight to ninety-two. “We were all talking about what we wanted and trying to pin down what was missing and suddenly I realized, this is it. The medium is the message,” recalls Vicky, then the youngest of the group. In other words, the very act of talking and sharing and building relationships with each other was the missing piece. From that emerged the Community Without Walls, Inc., a flourishing nonprofit that today has 450 people aged fifty and older from the Princeton area, organized into six chapters called houses. houses meet monthly or quarterly, depending on the house. In addition, each house has small groups of members who share an interest, such as a walking club or book group. “Some are organized to build community,” Vicky explained. For example, people break into dyads, interview each other, and introduce each other to the whole group. Or you bring in a photo of a grandparent, and in a small group, each person talks about the photo. That helps us build connections and learn about our past. Most of us don’t have friends from childhood around. Some people have those kinds of connections in the community, but many of us do not. how do you make those kinds of deep connections? The way is by doing things...

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