My Grandmother's Home
An old-fashioned housing arrangement allowed one grandmother to age in place
By: Marlene Druker
This is an excerpt from “Missing Middle and My Grandmother,” which was originally published on StrongTowns.org. Read the full story here.
I grew up on a street of mostly single family houses, with a few side-by-side duplexes. There is all sorts of housing in my old neighborhood. My mother's parents lived about half a mile away from us, down the street from the high school where my father taught. There might be a word for the form their house took, but I don't know it. It was a two-story structure with a basement. There was a firewall in the middle and my grandparents owned half. Their half had two stacked units, each with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The front porch on their side had two doors, one that opened to a staircase that went to the upper unit. My grandparents had the lower unit and rented out the upper. The basement had a garage, a heated storage area connected to my grandparents’ house by a staircase, and a very small (today might be called "tiny") one bedroom, one bathroom basement apartment.
Most of the time, the upper unit had a family in it and the basement a single person. My grandfather passed away in his sixties and my grandmother was a widow for the last third of her life. I couldn't tell you when Connie moved into the basement apartment. My grandmother liked her and even though we lived close by, my grandmother would ask Connie to help her with small tasks that she could not do on her own. My grandmother remained mentally sharp until almost the end of her life, but her physical decline was steady. At a certain point, my grandmother approached Connie and said, "You know, you help me so much... It doesn't make sense that you are paying me rent. I have so much extra space, including a bedroom that I don't use at all, why don't you come live with me?" At first, Connie lived rent free and helped my grandmother a little, but over time my grandmother needed even more help and Connie became my grandmother's full-time paid caretaker, a role she had until the end of my grandmother's life.
The advantages, beyond financial, that this sort of housing provides are life changing. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I never learnt my grandmother's recipes, but Connie did. Towards the very end of her life, my grandmother suffered some confusion, but Connie had known her well for so long that she still understood her. How would my grandmother have met Connie and known she would be the right person to move in with her, if not for the basement apartment?