The Art of Aging in Community

Louise and Kate.

The face of my eighty-five-year-old neighbor Louise is a map of life experience. Her keen blue eyes have witnessed decades of social change, from early civil and women’s rights movements to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the Cuban missile crisis and Vietnam War. She cradles her tea mug and smiles encouragingly as we sit at the snug table in her rented studio home, her high cheekbones framed by two silver gray braids that hang down to her shoulders. Born and raised in California, in Berkeley and Napa, Louise has spent her life as a writer, teacher, Buddhist practitioner, and social activist—devoting herself to peace initiatives, racial justice, antinuclear efforts, and caring for the earth. For fifteen years we’ve been neighbors in the Oakland, California, cohousing community I cofounded, and I value her as a powerful example of aging gracefully.

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My husband, Randy, and I joined our cohousing community when I was twenty-eight. We met during our undergraduate years at UC Santa Cruz in a Christian fellowship where we learned to prioritize community over the nuclear family-oriented American Dream of suburban life. When we arrived in Oakland in 1997, we were already veterans of shared housing. Both of us had lived with roommates and together had rented an apartment with a young family during my graduate studies. At our new church, we connected with a team of couples and singles interested in using the cohousing model as a way to be of service in a specific Oakland neighborhood. We wanted to put down roots in an urban setting, tutor at the local school, and “live lightly on the earth” by installing solar panels to generate energy and sharing resources such as cars, tools, and laundry machines. When Randy and I decided to participate, I wasn’t thinking of what growing old in cohousing might look like. Instead, I was enamored with what felt like an avantgarde faith practice of creating community…