I’m in the middle of that time when, if you are lucky enough, you get to help a parent or two migrate out of a long-held large home and into a smaller apartment in a supportive community. In my case, that conversation, with my mother, happened over eight years of strained, resistant phone calls, and it ended over a three-day period during which my mom agreed to sell her home and found an independent living facility in a different state, close to my brother and his family.
Whoa. Didn’t see that coming.
So here we are, navigating a home sale, an interstate move, packing, letting go of closets filled with the stuff closets get filled with, scheduling movers, hiring an organizer to help, setting up ACH for new rent payment, closing accounts, navigating a changing tax picture, returning cable equipment to Xfinity, and figuring out what to do with plenty of nice furniture that won’t fit.
It’s. A. Lot.
It would be a lot for me. As I watch my enormously smart and talented mother navigate it with help, the scale of it feels even more daunting. I am seeing that things that come easily to my brother and me, often highly enabled by technology, are not so simple for our completely sentient 83-year-old mother.
New questions arise every day:
- How can I explain to my mom how to set up ACH through her new resident portal?
- How to time a sequence of events associated with closing on her house and moving to a new place 1,000 miles away?
- How to help her think about the tax implications of paying her rent out of an IRA versus the taxable account that will incorporate the proceeds from her home sale?
- How to be sure every legacy billed account is closed in a timely way without micromanaging after her move?
It is wearying, but obviously we’re lucky our mom is still here and doing so well.
And, here’s what I’ve noticed: She has slipped. She is NOT the same as she was twenty or even ten years ago. She’s not as quick, not as efficient, not as on top of evolving tech trends.
That’s no dig on her. Because more than anything, what I have taken from this experience, admixed with the stories about President Biden’s capacity at nearly the same age as my mom, is that I AM ALSO SLIPPING as I write this. If you are over the age of 30, you are already slipping.
I recently read the terrific (and at times terrifying) book From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks. The book ably outlined and defended the notion that most of us begin our intellectual slide far earlier than we think we do. Some professions slide faster than others, but most of us peak in our 30s or 40s. The book offers great thoughts on how to pivot your focus to leverage the strengths that grow as many reliable forms of cognition begin to decline in the back half of life. It’s a worthy read.
Taking all of these inputs, I realized today that I want feedback about places where I’m losing ground. I don’t want to be shamed or blamed. I would like a gentle, generous heads up when any of my contemporaries or my array of much younger friends notices that I may be missing something.
When I mentioned this to one of those younger friends, she asked “How would you like that feedback to come?” Great question.
I think it would go something like this: “Sue, you are so accustomed to being on top of thinking that through / driving to that place / organizing that event that you may not notice that the way you’re approaching it today is different than it would have been 5/10/20 years ago, and in this case, I think you and your goal might benefit from some outside input. Would you be open to that?”
I hope my answer, if you are brave enough to ask me that, is an enthusiastic “Hell yes!” You are in my corner (and I am in yours) to be a good friend, and I consider this a mark of deep and connected friendship.
Thanks in advance, whether that’s in advance of 5 minutes or 5 years from now.
With love.
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Postscript: My upcoming book, Never Ask For the Sale: Supercharge Your Business With the Power of Passionate Ambivalence, is live and available during presale now. Get your copy and support my presale push ahead of the September 9th pub date.
Postscript 2: Relatedly, I am running a beta workshop on lessons from the book for solopreneurs, creatives, coaches, consultants or anyone else who is selling something that depends primarily on them. I have two seats left for the remote workshop. Check it out.
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