Leaving a Home and Finding a Home

We are honored to welcome Eric Johnson as a guest blogger. Eric is a long-time broadcaster who recently retired after more than three decades of storytelling at KOMO TV in Seattle. His mom was a Merrill Gardens resident for seven years, and he will be sharing his personal perspective with us in a series of blog posts throughout the year.

"We buried my mom this past weekend.

Her name was Rachell Johnson, last Friday would have been her 90th birthday, and she was kind and decent and beautiful. She was a wonderful mother, and I will miss her forever.

In the time since she passed, I’ve had time to consider her life, and the roads she took and the paths she chose. Life decisions made along the way, big and small.

She and my dad, Jack, worked hard. He was a fireman, she was a grade school secretary. Together they built a home up on a hill in the Spokane Valley, in the woods near Newman Lake. We could look out over the valley below us and watch the trains go by. The crickets played their song for us at night, and Dad built me a treehouse fit for a prince. We saw a lot of change from up there on our 13 acres. The valley changed, and so did we.

Jack and Rachell were so proud of that home. It had been their dream, after all.

After Dad died, I didn’t think Mom would last a month up there all alone. I underestimated her love of the place, I guess. She stayed in the house for 21 more amazing years.

But time has its way with all of us, doesn’t it? And so, for my mom, there came a time to leave the house on the hill.

She played Somewhere Over the Rainbow one last time on her beloved piano in the living room, and the moving trucks came and there were many tears.

Mom was moving to Seattle to be nearer to me and my wife Mo, and her two grandchildren.

Prior to that we weighed all our options. Finding a place for your mom to live is a big thing, after all, and there doesn’t seem to be a playbook. Either that, or we’re just not interested in the playbook until the decision is right there staring us in the eye, demanding an answer. I think we put off thinking about the inevitable things in life because they are just too sad to think about when we’re happy and relatively young and content.    

In any case, there we were. We needed to find a place, and it had to be right.

I knew we’d found the right place within minutes of walking into the Merrill Gardens retirement community in Ballard, WA. I’m serious.

The place is physically beautiful. It is welcoming and appealing and comfortable. It didn’t feel like some cold museum, or a sterile showroom of some kind. It felt new and nice, but also comfy and lived in. 

 It was also just a couple miles from my house.

 But it was more than that. Our decision was made because of smiles and human warmth. The people living there at Merrill Gardens seemed happy. They laughed and joked amongst themselves. They went about their days with a sense of inner joy that cannot be faked. You can sense when people are trying to convince themselves that they are happy, that they are somehow pretending. These people weren’t like that. These people seemed like they were at HOME.

And perhaps even more importantly, the people that worked at Merrill Gardens impressed me. It’s hard to describe really, because they are a mix of young people and older employees. They come from many places, near and far, with backgrounds that might be impossible for me to understand.

And yet… and yet I could tell, and over time I was proven to be absolutely correct, that they all shared one very important quality, perhaps the most important quality of all: they cared about other human beings. Really cared.

Over the course of seven years, I came to love some of them. I loved their way. I loved their kindness and their patience. Their decency. I loved the respect they showed to people dealing with all kinds of difficulties. I loved the way they loved my mother.

 Before she moved in, Mom came over to Seattle one weekend and walked through the place. She saw what would become her apartment. She met a handful of people. She approved. She was nervous and excited both.

 Early on, after she moved into her apartment on the 6th floor, she said it was like moving to a new high school. It was hard, she said. I think maybe she expected marching bands and a grand celebration of her arrival. But of course, it isn’t like that. She had to settle in and find her people. She had to make an effort to meet people, to work her way into THEIR lives. And she did.

 Over time she made many dear friends at Merrill Gardens, including a guy named Jack who I think she had a secret crush on.

 Over time, the place became home. Over time, it became one of the best decisions we ever made.

 Towards the end of my mom’s life, I would sit with her every day and we would have wide ranging conversations about her life and the people she had known. We talked about her father, who left Spain when he was 16 and became a coal miner in Utah. We talked about her childhood in Park City, long before it was a ski resort, and how the family went to the movies every single Sunday. We spoke of the joy of life and the beautiful promise of youth, and sometimes we talked about the struggles of aging, and the things that time takes away.

And one day we talked about the choice we had made, seven years before, to live at Merrill Gardens. She looked at me and said, “I love my apartment and I love this place. They treat me so well. We could not have picked a better place, Eric. I’m so happy here.”

All those conversations come back to me now that she’s gone. I replay them in my mind.

I’m at peace with the loss of Mom. I have no choice but to be, I suppose. I miss her sweetness in the worst way, though, and I don’t think that ever changes.

And I am content and proud about the important choice we made about Merrill Gardens.

I’m thankful for the place and the people and the way they treated my mom. I’m thankful that it became home to her and that there was not one single regret.   

Seven years ago, nervous and scared, we needed to find a place, and it had to be right.

And you know what? It was. Merrill Gardens was absolutely the right place."