THE LAST MOVE — The Strange but Right Decision to Settle into a Retirement Community

This piece ran in the newspapers in September, 2025, and it was surprisingly well-received on Daily Kos around that same time.

*************************

My wife and I moved into a retirement community five months ago. I feel an urge to add immediately that neither of us had any need for such a supportive environment. We could have continued to live our somewhat rugged life in a forest in the Virginia mountains. We were meeting the challenges of such a life with no obvious end in sight.

(That “urge” is because I don’t want you to think of me as a decrepit old man. I’m 79, and so far the deterioration hasn’t made me “different in kind” from what I’ve long been.)

So why would we move into a community where we would be surrounded by decrepitude?

(The largest age cohort in this place is 75–84, and the second largest 85–94. Most of the people around us move like old people.)

We looked around for such a place because
• we acknowledged the destiny built into our being human animals, that we won’t last forever;
• we recognized that eventually one will need things easier than in the mountains; and
• we were persuaded that it is better to move into such a community before one needs it.

But I would not have been on board to do it now if I’d not also been surprised by how well this particular place — Riderwood Village, in Silver Spring, MD — provides an environment for living a good, rich, and meaningful life.

After our two-day “Live the Life” visit here, I said: “Even if I were assured I’d never fall apart and never die, I could see choosing this move.”

After three months, that decision feels very right.

But there are challenges.

People are more beautiful when they are young, almost without exception. And I would much rather be looking at that kind of beauty more, and the unattractive consequences of aging less, than what one sees when there’s a crowd of residents. (The walkers, the wheelchairs, the people who need aides because they’ve lost it.)

Soon after I moved in here I wrote an essay saying that being in this community was doing for me what the skull on the desk did for the philosophers of half a millennium ago, as found in Renaissance paintings. The skull was to remind the philosopher, “You will die.” And I found that the community here gave me a similar reminder.

Except that the message was, “You will fall apart.”

That difference is the result of how, in a modern affluent society, a much larger proportion of the population will have to deal with the slow deterioration of aging, rather than just quickly dying of some disease or ailment before age has been able to take them apart.

Nobody knows just what the future holds. But it is probable that my wife and I have a lot of years left, and that means spending a meaningful chunk of life being alive but getting gradually more decrepit. It would be reasonable to bet that we’ll live into our nineties, and we can see around us what that might mean.

Moving in here before we need to enables us to build a life here so that the home stretch feels more like life well-lived. Make the friendships, take on the activities, create our own niche — all in an environment that supports people who need more support than they used to.

Because Riderwood is designed to support those who truly need it, this environment also frees those who don’t yet need that kind of help to design and build richer lives. (Piggy-backing on the more decrepit to gain a valuable kind of freedom.)

So April has joined the biking club and a few environmental groups. She’s starting a poetry-reading group.

I’ve made daily treks to the gym to work out and the hot tub where the jets give me a hot-water massage, and go to the well-chosen movies shown here every Saturday night.

I’m in the process of developing a role for myself here that is akin to what I’ve played elsewhere (as a newspaper op/ed columnist, as a talk radio host, as a public speaker on the current crisis in America).

That effort looks likely to get off the ground. And that would be very important to me — because my calling is at the heart of what I am. And because this community is almost certainly the one I’ll be living in for the rest of my life.

Which brings me to the title of this piece: “The Last Move.”

I’ve lived in a lot of places — in the Midwest, in the Southwest and West Coast, in the East. When I’ve moved, I’ve always known that I was moving into a “next chapter,” but there was every chance there would be other chapters lived in other places.

But such is the nature of moving into a community like this one that there’s a finality about it.

We’re not imprisoned, but there’s little chance of our moving out, or even changing apartments. This is IT!

That knowledge is something new to deal with. It’s not exactly bad, but it is weird.

I’ve never been very good at accepting my finitude. But now I am facing the reality that the race has a finish line, and the task is to run, with whatever strength I can muster, all the way to the wire.