Interview with The Village of Wentworth Heights family member, Dave Sackett

First of all, some context. I saw The Village of Wentworth Heights once pre-COVID, and that was when my mother was beginning the process of deciding to transition. She had been living for the past 20 years up in a cottage just south of Owen Sound, and had decided that she wanted to start to transition down. She was somebody who had had academic training and professional training in geriatric medicine and had been involved in a bunch of research across the province. So she was the one who did all of the work and found this place.

COVID came along, and so I have not been there or seen it since she moved in. I live down in Washington, DC. I have another brother who lives in Phoenix, another brother who lives out in British Columbia. Fortunately, one of the four brothers still lives in Lancaster, where we grew up, and he and his wife have a chance to interact with my mom on a weekly basis.

I talk to her every day. I call her at three o’clock every day, and I’ve done that for the last 17 months. I have been thrilled because you’re obviously always on the lookout for signs of depression or things like that, but she’s been extraordinarily happy through this whole thing.

The thing that impresses me the most is the people there. Every couple of days, my mother would relate an experience about a kindness that didn’t have to be done by a member of the staff or faculty at the facility, little things. The folks there seem to have an extraordinary passion to create and maintain a community that goes well above the job description.

There was a period [during the pandemic] in time when they had to eat in their rooms, and she jokingly said to one of the ladies, “Ha ha ha, you forgot my glass of wine.” Ten minutes later, there’s a knock on the door, and the lady brings her a glass of wine. There’s another lady who figured out how to attach a wheelchair to the front of a bicycle and would take different residents around the grounds so they could feel the breeze in their faces.

She tells me her suite is wonderful, that she feels extraordinarily comfortable there, that it is large enough, that she doesn’t feel trapped, and she can move around and have different places. She very much enjoys having the kitchen service there so that if she doesn’t feel like going down for dinner, or doesn’t like what’s for dinner, she’s able to cook for herself. The grocery stores are right across the way.

She’s able to have seating areas, bedding areas, and she’s got her crafts table. The other thing I would say about the social activities is that since COVID started, she and I have a standing three o’clock call, and half the time she’s not there because she’s down doing something. It’s joyful. She’s never bored. She never feels trapped. There are lots of great activities and things to do.

There’s a beautiful library that she loves. She’s organized card games and all of that stuff. From every report, it’s brilliant. They have pets there. They have stores there. Everything that she needs is really there.

I think it has improved in that she no longer has to feel totally and singularly responsible for every aspect of her life. When she was living up at the cottage, she had to worry about snow, ice, getting wood for the stove, what if you fall down, getting groceries, all of that stuff. So she feels far more part of a community, where there are people around that can support her.

One of the most difficult things there is, is to give up your independence and have the self-awareness that you do need help from people. She’s no longer afraid or ashamed or reticent to ask people for help and knows that it is always there for her.

She has more friends, more community, more interaction on a frequent and daily basis than she did when she was on her own. So it is, in many ways, fairly invigorating.

As she has had to accept physical limitations and use a walker, there was encouragement. There are other people doing the same thing, and so you can see that it is acceptable and not a sign of weakness. Schlegel, at least at my mother’s facility, was always very clear about procedurally what needed to happen, but was also doing things in a way that tried to maintain mental health and give people hope and opportunity.

They demonstrate on a daily basis that they are committed professionals who want to go to the nth degree to make sure that their residents are comfortable. They go well beyond their mission statement. They go well beyond what you would even reasonably expect. They truly are committed in a way that you would see in people who are volunteers.

The other thing that my mother would say she appreciates very much is how responsive they are to inquiries, how quick they are in answering those inquiries, and how they’re happy to explain not just what the procedure is, but why it has to be this way. Nobody’s left in the dark.

It’s a wonderful, beautiful facility, but it’s the people that are inside it that make all the difference in the world.

Three of her four children live dramatic distances away. I have a brother in Vancouver, a brother in Phoenix, and I live in Washington, DC. If there is a problem or something like that, it’s 24 hours or 14 hours before you could get there. When she was living up in that cottage by herself, particularly in the wintertime, we were worried about what if something happened, what if she got injured, what if she got sick.

We know that she is safe with all certainty. Secondly, we know that there are people who care about her, who will check in on her on a regular basis. Then the kindness that is shown to her makes her feel valued and loved. That is all dramatically important.

She is living a full and vibrant life, full of interesting things, looks forward to and embraces every new day, and is always remarking on how surprised she is at how busy and full her life is. The degree to which that provides us with a feeling of comfort and security, and just joy, is extraordinary for us.

I could not recommend it more emphatically. When we first went up to look at it, when my mom put her name on the waiting list, they said it was about a year and a half wait. I don’t care how long the waiting list is to get into this place. It is absolutely worth it, because I cannot imagine a better, happier set of circumstances for her to live in. We have yet to find the disappointment within the context of this community.

Start researching as soon as possible, because problems will come, often more quickly than you think. You ought to be able to make a choice based on a wide variety of issues instead of having the speed with which you can get in be the primary decision. So the sooner that you can make that decision, the better off you are

The Village of Wentworth Heights recognizes that your loved one is not going to be in a static state. There is going to be, inevitably, erosion. So is it a place where they are able to transition through the various phases of the rest of their life? Changing facilities or having to find a new place is brutally hard on everybody, not least of all the resident.

The last thing I would say is get away from the people giving you the tour and just sit in a chair and observe. Watch the people who work there. Watch the way that they interact with the residents. You can learn more about a facility by figuring out what time they serve lunch and parking yourself in a chair outside the entrance to the dining room about 20 minutes before lunch starts. That is an unguarded moment and gives you a really good sense of what that place is truly like

She would have come at it from a pragmatic standpoint of having done a lot of field research on geriatric care and geriatric hospitals. She would have been able to identify places that were not up to par, and was summarily impressed in terms of facilities and things like that, all across the board.

I know that she had mentioned that one of the things that she found most encouraging was that even though it was not applicable to her at the time, she was very impressed with the memory care unit. She said their quality of life and their facilities were brilliant as well.

She just looked around and was able to see that you can fake certain things, but you can’t fake the totality of it. It was almost certainly the attitude of the folks that she interacted with. Her professional background made her determined that this would not be something burdensome on her kids and her family. So she said, look, I’ve heard enough stories and I’ve seen enough situations of this occurring in her research to say, that’s not happening here.

It looked and felt to me like a fun college dormitory, as opposed to an assisted living facility. Some of these places, you go into them, and it feels like God’s little waiting room. This felt like a place with all kinds of different stuff, and they were going to allow you to have as much freedom and opportunity as possible.

The apartments were surprisingly bigger, much more well maintained, and all that stuff, than I might have expected they would be. A lot of these places now look more like a Courtyard by Marriott, as opposed to "a ward."

She described it to us in very happy terms and said that it happened literally over a period of two or three hours. Folks helped and got everything up into her room and got it set up extremely quickly. There were several pieces of furniture that she had to order that came in later, and when those would come in, somebody would bring them up and set them up right away. It was much more seamless and far less chaotic. She was done with the process 24 hours quicker than she’d anticipated.

People have gotten very good at making things look great on the Internet. If you take the right seven photographs, you can make an outhouse look like Windsor Castle. Unless you can physically lay your eyes on the place and physically interact with and get a measure of the people who are running it and operating it, you really don’t know enough.

You can live in the most beautiful facility with the finest appointments that exist, but if the people who are there are not committed caregivers, your life is not going to be very happy. Pay attention to the people more than to the shiny objects.