Into the Woodlands

By Jeff Alden

May 18, 2026 –Yesterday Paulette and I drove out to visit The Woodlands again. We’d been on the
waiting list since 2018, when we moved to Greenville, S.C. from Minneapolis. We were almost
ten years younger then. The Woodlands at Furman (the small university it’s loosely connected
to) is billed as a “Life Care Community,” designed to take you from independent-living through
to the end. At the time, the idea of moving to such a place, otherwise called a CCCR or
continuum of care retirement community, seemed to us remote and undesirable at best.

We were still both in pretty good health. But now Paulette had just turned 79 and I was 76. We didn’t have children and both my brothers lived on the West Coast. We’d witnessed our parents decline and die, so who exactly was going to give us the kind of care we’d given to them as they aged over many difficult years.

Still, we didn’t want to move to The Woodlands. We loved our Greenville home, our
neighbors and neighborhood, the short walks to Main Street in “happening” downtown
Greenville or the beautiful Cleveland Park, where we walked (tallying our steps) nearly every
day.

But we couldn’t escape the sad reality that one of us will die first. No way around that.
What would the survivor do, for instance, if he or she had dementia and was suddenly alone?
When we told friends we were eventually going to move to The Woodlands, the usual reaction
was along the lines of “I’m staying in my own house ‘til they carry me out feet first!”
accompanied by a certain unmistakable feistiness. Why did Paulette and I feel the need to be so
proactive about our inevitable decline when so many of our friends were willing to shrug off
whatever was coming their way?

The easy answer was no kids. But the same people who said they planned to die with
their boots on, would in the next breath tell you they didn’t plan to burden their children,
ignoring the reality that, to a greater or lesser extent, at some point they’d most likely become
their children’s greatest worry.

We could also see that for many, the reason to shrug off their lurking decrepitude was
money. Moving to a place like The Woodlands is expensive, though we knew people of means
who still couldn’t get themselves to pull the trigger.

Another obstacle to moving to a CCCR while you’re still (as George W. Bush liked to
put it) “The Decider” was also easy to understand: the significant burden of having to clean out
and sell the house you’ve lived in for so long, throw out half your stuff, and get the rest of it
(along with yourselves) across town, or country, to a new home. All this while you’re still spry
enough mentally and physically to handle the logistics. Finally, a good reason not to move to a
place like The Woodlands is that there simply isn’t one near where you live or would like to
live.

Since the time we’d signed on to The Woodlands’ waiting list, we’d more than once
turned down the chance to move to one of the independent-living apartments that came available
over the years. Now, because we’d been on the list for so long, we were in a position to have first
choice of an apartment in a new wing being built there (ironically called “The Falls”). The Falls
was supposed to be completed in two years.

As soon as the floorplans for The Falls were available, the pressure to buy-in was intense.
We had to decide immediately, meaning in a day, if we wanted one of the big units on the top,
fourth floor. Within a day after the plans were ready to view, like Thelma and Louise going over
the cliff, we’d wired The Woodlands ten percent of the entry fee to hold the one we chose. All
the new apartments (24 of them) were gone in twenty-four hours.

Stay tuned.

Editor Comment: Thanks Jeff for your insight into this topic, which everyone should be considering. Great to learn of your personal experiences – and we look forward to hearing more once you move in. The Woodlands sounds great!

Jeff has been a frequent contributor to Topretirements.com. See also:
My Big Southern Retirement Adventure

Breaking Away: Where the Rubber Hit the Road in Jeff’s Retirement