How to Help Downsize for a Move to Assisted Living
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Have you ever been in the position of needing to downsize or get rid of things you’ve held onto for years? Maybe you were moving from a three-bedroom house to a one-bedroom studio apartment. It might’ve been after a divorce. Or perhaps when your parents were downsizing and you were just starting out in your young adult life, you couldn’t keep everything. For a senior who is downsizing to transition to assisted living (a great elder care choice to make), that may be a difficult process. It might not be that the senior is enthusiastic about moving, but that they understand the reason it’s good at this stage in their life.
You may be worried about your grandmother or grandfather, mother or father, maybe your brother or sister, or close friend who’s facing this very challenge right now. They have decided assisted living is the best for them at this stage in their life, but they are moving into a very small room from a full house (or a large apartment).
In other words, they have a lot of possessions they’ve acquired over the years. Sure, there are storage facilities all over the place these days, but they can be expensive. Where do they begin? Where do they start to begin thinning out some of those possessions? And, often more pressing to them, what do they do with everything they’ve acquired through the years?
Start small.
This is easy to say, but what does it mean? If you’re wondering how you can help that aging loved one in your life begin making decisions about downsizing, encourage them to start somewhere small. They don’t have to try and downsize and go through everything in the entire house right away.
Assuming they have time to take it a bit slow, they should. As slow as they need to go in order to feel more comfortable.
For example, there might be a closet in a spare bedroom where they have stored a few boxes of pictures, mementos acquired through years of travel, and perhaps birthday and holiday cards they received from people through the years. Start there.
What happens when you start at this point?
Elder Care Greenville SC – How to Help Downsize for a Move to Assisted Living
If you can start at a place where they are exposed to memories they haven’t seen or thought about in many years, especially photo albums or greeting cards, they can travel across the course of their life and begin realizing how much they did and how many lives they impacted.
Suddenly, it becomes a little bit easier to let things go. Plus, when that senior comes across a different item, piece of furniture, or something else they can’t take with them to assisted living and have no real need of it any longer, they might just remember somebody in their life, maybe even somebody they haven’t heard from or seen or talked to in years, who would appreciate it.
You can help by going through these things step-by-step and starting small.
