With professional assistance, sisters Lynn Schutzberg and Joyce Kanyuk, rear left and right, moved their mother, Jean Dubin, into a pretty assisted-living apartment in Somerset.
Moving on
Annette Masaryk’s firm, Tranquil Transitions, specializes in moving elderly people. Her advice includes:
- Start well in advance of the move, to avoid overload and exhaustion.
- Be flexible and allow for the emotional process of relinquishing possessions.
- Create a floor plan of the new space, measuring existing furniture to work out what to keep, abandon, or replace.
- Work out what is to be given away, sold, donated, or thrown out.
- Start packing or disposing of the things that aren’t in current use.
The Stein Residence offer is valid through the end of August. For more information, or to schedule a personal tour, call 732-568-1155 or visit www.steinresidence.org.
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July 9, 2009
For the elderly leaving their homes for a senior residence, the move itself may be one of the most traumatic — and overlooked — aspects of the entire experience.
“Some people are excited about having a fresh start,” said Toby Ehrlich, director of marketing for the Martin and Edith Stein Assisted Living Residence at the Oscar and Ella Wilf Campus for Senior Living in Somerset. “But for others there is a very tough psychological component to this process — having to give their things away, especially if they don’t understand why they have to move.
“They know this might be the last place that they will live in the community, and that they aren’t going to be as independent as they were,” she added. “Most of us never envision this and families tend to be in denial about how much help their parents will need.”
All that, she said, is what motivated the Stein Residence to offer a special program through the end of August. Those planning to move into the residence can have free meetings with a planning consultant, who can help them design the layout of their apartment, plan their move, and “declutter” their old home.
The program also offers $1,000 in savings on moving expenses, including packing and unpacking, and — to take the ache out of the experience — “a complimentary salon visit for post-move relaxation.”
Ehrlich said the residence has been offering moving assistance for some time. When resident Jean Dubin moved in four years ago from her home in Springfield, her family welcomed the help.
According to her daughter, Lynn Schutzberg, Dubin was one of the neatest and most organized of people. Dubin had already winnowed down her possessions moving from her house to an apartment, but it was still an enormous job moving her to the assisted-living unit.
Schutzberg and her sister, Joyce Kanyuk, handled the whole move while their mother was in rehab recovering from surgery. Coping with spinal stenosis and some early signs of dementia, she could no longer live alone, family members agreed.
To complicate matters, the move had to be done on the day she was discharged from the rehabilitation center and had to be completed by 2:30 in the afternoon.
Ehrlich arranged to have a moving professional come in to advise them on what furniture would fit the new apartment. She also helped them sort through clothes. That wasn’t too hard a task; Dubin wasn’t one to keep what she no longer wore. But books were a different story. She had masses of them. Almost all were donated to the Springfield Public Library.
One of the most helpful people, Schutzberg said, was the man hired to help them work out which pictures to keep. He then hung them in the new space, after carefully calculating where Dubin would be sitting and what images she’d want closest to her.
Their mother arrived to find a pleasant space already filled with her favorite things. “It was beautifully done,” Schutzberg said. “She walked in and she liked it.”
‘While you can’
Among the professionals hired by the Stein Residence is Annette Masaryk, the owner of Tranquil Transitions. She and her staff of 12 specialize in moving seniors.
She says seven years in the business (and doing corporate relocations before that) has taught her the following: “Life is not about things; it’s about relationships.”
She and her team like to start the moving process well in advance, sometimes as early as four weeks before moving day. They might not come in every day. “If the clients feel overloaded, we need to stop, and give them a chance to rest,” she said. “We come back a few days later and carry on.”
They start with a walk-through, discussing which things are loved and needed. “We know how to keep things moving, but we listen to the clients and listen to their stories. We laugh, and cry, and even dance with them.”
She advises everyone to make decisions “while you can.”
After being involved in so many moves, Masaryk says, she and her staff have become much more anti-clutter in their own homes. “We all joke about it — how we’re always throwing things out now,” she said. They know what they don’t want to face down the road.
Gary Crystal, who lives in Watchung, helped move his great-aunt into the Stein Residence a couple of years ago. He is a busy dentist with a young family, so he turned to Masaryk and her staff. They helped plan, sort out what was to be kept, and dispose of what needed to go.
“My aunt was about 90 at the time,” he said. “She would get very confused, but the people from Tranquil Transitions were very sweet with her. They explained things to her over and over again. The best thing about having them was that I could take her away from the apartment while they got on with doing all the work.”
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