Moving Mom

I helped my mom move this weekend. She lives in retirement community and is downsizing from a one-bedroom apartment to a studio apartment. Not by choice, though. By no choice is more like it. Several months ago she got a letter from the company that administers her 401(k) informing her that because of the downturn in the stock market, the value of her portfolio dropped significantly and the only way they could continue making payments on her pension was to reduce the amount she received each month. So, like that, her monthly retirement checks were cut in half and making the rent was suddenly a struggle. The only way she could continue to stay in the retirement community, which she truly likes, was to move to a smaller place where the rent was cheaper.

As I stood in the empty apartment, looking at what was once her home, I felt a genuine sense of tragedy. Here's a woman who worked her entire life, struggled to make ends meet, finally got to a place where she was comfortable and happy, and is now forced to go somewhere she shouldn't be. Yes, unless your name is Gates or Buffett or Trump, most of our residential lives can be tracked on a bell curve—you start off small, get bigger and then go back to small. But by choice. And I guess that's what bothers me most about this. This wasn't by choice. Her life—mine? ours?—was and is in a large way controlled by a bunch of knuckleheads on Wall Street. Yes, yes, there are many others who share the responsibility for the market crash. But it still makes you want to start stuffing your mattress with money. And it also makes you wonder if all of those people who were approving bad loans or defaulting on their McMansions or overextending credit card limits ever thought about the people who would pay the price for their actions. People like my mom.

It's too late to do anything about that now, of course. We need to look forward. We also need to learn. And it seems to me, one of the lessons that we could all stand to learn from this economic mess we've gotten ourselves into is that we really are our brothers' and sisters' keepers. Our lives, whether we want to admit it or not, are a tightly woven web. Everything we do is connected. It's a lesson my mom taught me a long time ago, and one I need reminded of periodically as well. Standing in her old apartment, I was reminded. As for Mom, her view of the matter, of course, is better than mine. She's approaching the whole move positively and thinks the new place will be great. If she's there, it will be.