Get the inside scoop with senior living communities. In this segment, resident Lynn Coulibaly joins Suzanne. She is a retired nurse administrator who resides at Era Living’s Aljoya Thornton Place community. She worked at the general hospital in Everett, Washington, and took early retirement when two hospitals merged.
For people considering senior living, Lynn advises, “I imagine that most people have something that they’re looking for, so you think about that. Do you need something in the health care side? Most people are given meals to come in and check out the place, and I highly recommend that. But not just to see what kind of food they serve, which is important, but it’s the environment where you’re served the food, what the dining room is like, because we spend a lot of time in the dining room. That’s where you have groups of friends every night, lots of good stories. Certainly the health care side is important, where you check out to see as I age, what’s my plan. Most seniors these days have a plan in mind.”
Lynn has lived at Aljoia for ten years. “When I started looking [at senior living communities], a friend of mine said she was starting to look, and we were both looking for the future. We thought we were too young to move into a retirement community. And we said, well, let’s go look together for the future. We decided to do it together, and Aljoia Thornton Place happened to be the last one. And when we walked in, I guess it was meant to be. This was just for the future, but we had such a good time. They were having an art show and there was a gala and the residents were there, and we felt we were very smart, because we recognized that we needed to find the people with name tags that identified them as not other guests but residents. There was a gentleman sitting on the couch in our library area and we spotted his name tag. So we said, ah, you’re a resident. And he said, ‘Oh, yes, but I have a girlfriend.’ He thought we were hitting on him. That means a lot.
“And then we were browsing through the art show and having nice, lovely glasses of wine with different residents. And they were all very interesting. Suddenly somebody collapsed behind me. And immediately I thought, ‘I’m a nurse, they’re probably gonna need help.’ But it turned out that one of the residents here was a very revered physician. And when I turned around, he was kneeling beside the person who collapsed, and everybody gave them space, and everybody went back to chatting and drinking their wine. The medics came, took him away, and everybody wished him luck and cheered him on. And I thought that’s really nice – when I have something happen to me, that’s what I want to have happen to me, needed by friends.
“The energy here was so palpable, the good energy, so when we left the building, we said, this is it, this is where we’ll move.”
Learn more about Aljoya Thornton Place, located at 450 NE 100th St. in Seattle, WA. There’s more about Era Living at Answers for Elders and at eraliving.com.
- http://www.eraliving.com/communities/north-seattle/
- https://answersforelders.com/era-living/
- https://www.eraliving.com/
