Interviewed by: Alexandra Cohl

This week, I speak with Christina Long, the founder and principal of Vertical Architecture Enterprises LLC. She shares with me with what prompted a move into her mother and grandmother’s home during a period of time throughout the pandemic and the joys and challenges of this four-generation living situation.

Christina, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m super stoked to have you here and talk about this four-generation experience of living together with your family throughout the pandemic. I have a couple questions for you to start off with: What initially prompted this four-generation household and who was all living together in this space?

Thank you, Alexandra. Excited to share my experiences. So, my four generations consist of my 99-year-old grandmother, Priscilla, who is doing remarkably well considering she’ll be 100 in August of 2021. My mother, who is 79, and myself and my two children. My daughter is 10 and my son is seven. My children and I recently moved back to Baltimore from the Boston area to be closer to my mother and grandmother who live in Annapolis. My mother has now for many years lived with my grandmother to help her be at home and age gracefully at home. And that had been working out well.

Then, a few months before the pandemic my mother started to have all sorts of health issues. She broke her hip and could not walk well–this was December or January—and that was also when my grandmother got double pneumonia. So, February of 2020, she was in the hospital. We all thought this was the end. I mean, she was 98 at this point with double pneumonia. I would go to visit her and was always a little teary at these visits because I was just like this is this is it. And by golly, she beat it. I mean, it was wonderful. They were going to discharge her, but she was incredibly frail and could barely stand.

It was also right when we’re hearing news of COVID-19. So, this would be when we were looking at rehabilitation centers because there was no way she could get by at home with my mother who could barely walk with her hip the issues. And so, as we were thinking about rehabilitation centers, we’re hearing all the news out of Seattle and all the nursing home deaths with this new virus. And we’re like, we can’t send Nana there. We’ll have her at home, and we’ll get one of these home health aide companies who can also take care of my mother now, who all of a sudden, needs help at the same time. So, they started, and we quickly saw that to cover one week of shifts, they had three or four different people coming to the house, which was no good – we were very exposed – and they couldn’t guarantee that one person could come who had not had contact with another family. It just seemed so high risk. In late March, I decided they couldn’t come to her home anymore.

I realized that I needed to be the care provider for my grandmother and my mother. And as a single mother of two children, that meant them too. So, my children and I moved to the house in Annapolis. And, for several months began me being the only able-bodied adult in a house of five and it was very hard, to put it mildly. You know, just the stress of the pandemic, with having groceries delivered, wiping everything down (what we were told we needed to do), and the stress of not knowing when this would be over. In the back of my mind was the stress of having to pause my work and not knowing what the ramifications would be from walking away from a business I had just started.

I quickly learned that I am not very good at caring for four other people. I mean, there was one particular day where my children, of course, are doing remote learning—my son is finishing kindergarten online and my daughter was in third grade at this point—and I remember my son couldn’t log on, and I was trying to get them logged on and couldn’t get to work. Meanwhile, my grandmother is saying, “It’s one o’clock, and I haven’t had lunch yet.” And, I just was like, I’m not doing this well. It was very stressful.

Everyone stayed healthy and somehow my children finished kindergarten and third grade. But, we were that way until June of 2020. We eventually found some other help—a woman from the neighborhood could come in and helped my grandmother and mother for several hours a day. So, that enabled me and my children to move back to Baltimore during the week. Then, I found a teenager in the neighborhood to help me that summer with the kids, and of course, all this came with some risk. But, it was a risk we needed to take as a family because I needed to get back to work.

Well, I appreciate the candor in which you speak about how that whole situation went. Because I think some people are definitely looking towards merging families as this helpful option—this idea that maybe the intergenerational option of having multiple adults in one home can alleviate some responsibilities with the kids, like having them play with their grandparents for a period of time or things like that. I think the reality and what your situation was and is shows that depending on the situation, it can be way more complex than that and a lot of the responsibility can end up falling on one person. It is helpful to know the potential challenges.

Bandaging my grandmother’s feet, she has open wounds on her feet, getting the ice packs for my mother’s various areas she had broken, keeping my children engaged and happy and trying to help them feel like life isn’t that crazy. Preparing all the meals, keeping the house clean. I mean, it was all on me. And I hate to complain though because we were very fortunate. I mean, never did we have any food scarcity or concern that we would lose our home or anything like that. So, I frankly hate framing any of this as a hardship because we were so fortunate. I talk about the challenges of it, but I don’t mean to dismiss the joys of it, too. My children and I got to spend all this time with my mother and grandmother. There were plenty of silver linings and plenty of things to be grateful about.

Well, I think that’s such an important piece, because we all experienced our own different types and levels of suffering in the last year. But also, these moments of joy and things we got to experience because of the pandemic that maybe we weren’t doing before. So, I’d actually love to hear if you can pinpoint a couple examples beyond just the additional time that were these joyous moments that maybe wouldn’t have come about if you weren’t all in the same home together during that period of time.

Well, I would say that my grandmother and I resumed our backgammon game competitions. I can see that when we played frequently, her mind was kept sharp. When we let some time pass between our games, she needed to be reminded a little bit of the rules. But, you know, she beats me! She gets so happy when she beats me. So, that was fun.

I should also say our houses are still quite conjoined. My children and I are there every weekend and we’ll help out. So our lives are still very much like those early months of the pandemic except now just on the weekends. Back to the joys, I would say that my mother was reading to my son a lot. This happened in kindergarten and he was just on the verge of learning how to read. She would be reading to him for several hours a day. And, she helped him learn how to read, and so that was really great fun watching them.

She saw the kinds of books he really embraced, and she would get the books and have them sent by Amazon (Again here’s where we are incredibly lucky people that we could have whatever books he wanted delivered by Amazon). He loves I Survive series and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that in a pandemic these are the types of stories my then six-year-old wanted to hear about. Kids’ perspectives of surviving the sinking of the Titanic or 9/11 or a shark attack. This was something that really fascinated my son. I guess it’s comforting to know that people lived through these horrific things. Kids lived through them. So, it was really great fun watching the two of them have this kind of reading bubble. They would write their own stories, too.

My children and I explored parts of my grandmother’s neighborhood we never had before. It’s very hilly where they live, and because we were afraid to go on the bike trail near their house because it was really crowded, we just decided we would be walking around the neighborhood. You find all these different nooks and crannies we really didn’t know, and we started naming all the hills. So, we had what we called our “Nine Hill Walk” because it entailed us going up to up and down nine different hills and we named them all based on things we would see. There was Squirrel Hill, Bamboo Hill, Ant Hill, and Rock Hill. Goat Hill because one of the neighbors had goats and we’d go visit the goats. A big destination. They all had names. We found a whole new world in this insular life, and that was quite engaging for us. My children and I really appreciated those walks, and we still do our Nine Hill Walk when we’re in Annapolis.

I love that. So, I have one final question for you that has two parts. I’m curious, first, if prior to this situation what your thoughts and anticipations were about this inter-generational set up. Had you ever planned that you would be living with your mother like she had been and is doing with your grandmother? Or, was that something that you hadn’t quite considered? And, how has your opinion or thoughts about living in an inter-generational household or manner changed since having gone through that?

I think it really depends on the relationships between the family members as to whether or not it makes sense. You know, my grandmother and I have always really gotten on well. Way back in 2000, my grandfather died, and this was her partner of almost 60 years, and I had just gotten out of grad school, and it was devastating to lose my grandfather, who I was very close to as well. She immediately started having all these health issues because, of course, she was his care giver and often when a spouse deceases who the other spouse had been caring for, all of a sudden, all of the things that the caretaker spouse had neglected come in full force. I thought we were going to lose her, too. She adored her husband and had all these heart issues. I moved in with her then, thinking that it might not be long that she would be with us.

But, she was great. She revived. She got involved in her community. She was really into sailing. She didn’t go sailing, but she would be doing things where she was among the sailing community. She was fine! That’s when I had been working as an architect while I was living with her, but then I took a job in Manhattan.

It always was like this “she needs me right now” and I just did it. It wasn’t something I had planned back then. Same with last year at the beginning of a pandemic; I didn’t plan on it. I had moved here to be closer, but I didn’t plan on living with my grandmother and my mother. Every weekend we are together so we do spend a lot of time together, but I think we all need our space. And thanks to technology, with groceries being delivered and nurses who can come and devices that track and monitor my grandmother’s pacemaker and her INR levels, all these devices enable her to stay there. I don’t think that in this case, I will live with them again. I think that I would like for as long as possible for them to get the help they need in their house. Since now everyone’s vaccinated, they’ve hired a new home health aide company. And, we’ll give it a try. They want to stay in their house until the end.

So, I think that the solution for our family is that they do that with the help of these home health aides with groceries being delivered and nurses coming to check and physical therapist community check. And Uber drivers taking them where they might need to go. I mean, what has happened recently with technology and these businesses, it really does extend the timeframe for them being in their home.

I think that also, the solution entails my kids and myself going there every weekend. I’m spending time with them. It’s a mix of that close time where we are in the house together on the weekends and then during the week, I can focus on my kids solely and my work

It kind of seems like almost your version of what another type of hybrid model can look like; there is this mix of everything. Especially after hearing you share that piece about going to live with your grandmother after your grandfather passed away, I can’t help but think that your presence there and her getting to be surrounded by family helped with the healing process of her physical and emotional health.

The healing process entailed a lot of Martinis and Frank Sinatra.

That is very essential, too. [Laughter]. I love that. Your grandmother sounds amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. It’s great getting to hear all the different levels that go into it. The hard parts. The good parts. I think it’s just awesome to hear how that can work and to know what challenges might be there, if that’s something that a family does want to explore.

Yeah, and I have to stress again, it’s privilege that we’ve been able to do this, and I don’t take that for granted. And I just look at the things that Jane Rohde is working on now, and how it will allow people to live in family like settings for their days as long as they want.

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