At Home Together

Young and old living side by side is improving the lives of everyone.

- Lisa Fitterman

TAIMI TASKINEN SETTLED IN HER WHEELCHAIR, preparing for a day that promised to be different from all the others in her ten years living at the Rudolf Seniors’ Home in Helsinki. During breakfast in the cafeteria that morning in January 2016, residents were told that several young people were moving in as part of a pilot project by the city.

How is that going to work? Taimi asked herself.

At 82, confined to the wheelchair since a stroke in 2001 paralyzed her left side, she couldn’t imagine what she’d have in common with a youngster who wasn’t family. Her reverie was interrupted when a slim young man with dark hair and a tentative smile appeared in her doorway. She’d left it open, as she always did in the morning.

“Hi! I’m your new neighbor across the hall,” the young man said. “My name’s Jona, short for Jonatan. Mind if I come in?”

“Please,” she replied, at once curious and wary.

“I’ll make coffee,” he announced, going into her kitchenette. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

Startling herself a bit, she did. She spoke of growing up in a mid-size lakeside town in eastern Finland and of her husband who died in 1970 from a heart attack, leaving her to raise four kids. Of toiling as a cleaning lady before getting a job in a factory that produced margarine; of the terrible death of a son—her second eldest— on his 45th birthday back in 2002. Of her pleasant, uneventful life in the residence; of her love of drawing and painting, hobbies she’d picked up after the stroke.

“Thank God I’m right-handed!” she said, nodding to the left one resting on her lap, curled into a claw.