“You can’t be born here, and you can’t die here anymore,” Carolyn Wills says it with a touch of humor, but behind the observation is a painful reality for an 87-year-old woman who never planned to leave Estes Park.
On Tuesday morning, with the help of family, Carolyn and her husband, Ken, 88, left the community they have called home since retiring here in 2003. They are moving to the Kansas City metropolitan area, where two of their three adult children and their families live and where medical care, transportation, and multiple levels of senior care will be close at hand.
The move was not part of their plan.
“We had not planned to leave,” Carolyn said. “We like winters here.”
But Ken is living with dementia. Carolyn has glaucoma and stopped driving five years ago. Until recently, Ken drove for both of them, but that was no longer safe. They donated their car earlier this month.
The stone steps around their Estes Park home, once simply part of living in a mountain cabin, had become another hazard to negotiate.
For Carolyn, their story illustrates something larger about growing old in a community many people choose as the place where they hope to spend the rest of their lives.
Estes Park no longer has a maternity unit, nursing home, or in-home hospice program.
For the Willses, the more immediate question became whether they could keep living independently and safely.
‘Our lives just changed’
A year ago, Carolyn said, they had no idea they would be leaving Estes Park. Then Ken underwent cognitive testing. He could work with numbers, even repeating numbers backward. Words were different.
“He couldn’t remember the word red,” Carolyn said.
A nurse tried prompting him by asking the color of Santa’s suit and then the color of an apple. The connection did not come. Subsequent medical testing found evidence of multiple transient ischemic attacks, or TIAs, on both sides of his brain.
“Our lives just changed right there,” Carolyn said.
The changes became impossible to dismiss. About two months ago, Carolyn walked into the bathroom to put away clean clothes and stepped into water. Ken had plugged the sink, turned the faucet on full, and walked away.
Water filled the drawers and ran into the garage below. The garage ceiling had to be repaired and large fans brought in to dry the house.
Ken had no memory of doing it.
That incident helped convince Carolyn that they could no longer continue as they had.
The couple has been married 67 years. Carolyn remembers the man who once stood at the helm of a Navy destroyer, worked at the National Security Agency, and later entered the ministry.
“He was a naval officer at the helm of a destroyer,” Carolyn said. “He was at the National Security Agency, and then later in life, a pastor.”
Now dementia is taking away abilities that once defined his independence.
When driving ends
Carolyn knows something about losing independence herself.
Glaucoma forced her to give up driving five years ago. For several years, Ken continued to drive locally, but the couple had already stopped driving “down the hill.”
That made medical appointments outside Estes Park increasingly difficult.
Carolyn sees an eye specialist in Longmont once a year. Her sister takes her. At other times, the couple has depended on friends or their children.
“We just beg rides,” she said.
The couple got their groceries delivered, attended Sunday worship services online, and Carolyn praised the Estes Valley Library’s home delivery service for books. But prescriptions were another challenge.
“And the thing is, you can’t drive down the hill,” Carolyn said. “That’s a big deal. We’ve not driven down the hill for three years.”
Carolyn has also fallen several times. She has learned that walking now requires concentration.
“Every step of the way,” she said. “When I’m walking somewhere, I have to look at the ground because I have to see where my feet are going.”
It is a small example of something Carolyn has spent considerable time thinking and writing about: the things aging gradually takes away. She recently wrote a short work she calls a primer on aging, “And Then I Couldn’t.”
“I used to play golf and tennis, and then I couldn’t,” she said. “And I used to play bass and harp, and then I couldn’t.” Then came driving.
Her writing is not simply a catalog of those losses. It is also about how she has learned to adapt to them.
A life of ministry
Carolyn has spent much of her life helping others navigate change and loss. She attended Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, where she also earned her doctorate. She and Ken both served as pastors, first in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and later in the United Methodist Church.
Carolyn once led a congregation of about 1,000 members in Kansas City, Kansas. The couple lived in parsonages across Kansas before retiring.
In Estes Park, they eventually made St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church their spiritual home and worshiped there for about 20 years.
Carolyn spent years sitting with people in hospitals and at the end of life. She believes one of the most important things a person can offer another is simple human presence.
“Just listening,” she said. Now she is the one navigating loss and change. And she has watched other older friends leave Estes Park for many of the same reasons.
“We’ve lost three couples in our church in the last six months because they had to leave because of the aging,” she said.
Going home again
Kansas City is not unfamiliar territory for the Willses.
They lived in the metropolitan area for 25 years before their years in ministry took them around Kansas. They raised three children. Two of those children and their families now live in Johnson County.
“That’s the whole thing,” Carolyn said. “We have two sets of children and two sets of grandchildren in Kansas City.”
Their new home is at Brookdale, a senior living community in Overland Park that offers multiple levels of care. Carolyn and Ken will initially live together in a two-bedroom independent-living apartment. When Ken needs memory care, Carolyn said he can move into that area, and she will move into a one-bedroom unit.
For a couple accustomed to finding rides down the mountain for specialized care, proximity matters. Medical services are nearby. A University of Kansas medical office is next door, and a hospital is close by.
‘I love every rock in our yard’
Their children helped with the move, renting vans to carry the things their parents need. They don’t have to take everything. The family is keeping the Estes Park cabin which the Willses bought in 1990.
Built in 1905 and tucked in the woods, it gave them a permanent home during years when their work as pastors meant living in church-owned parsonages elsewhere.
They knew where they wanted to retire. In 2003, they came to Estes Park full-time and stayed 23 years.
Carolyn built friendships, became deeply involved in the community, and continued her decades-long involvement in P.E.O., the philanthropic organization that supports educational opportunities for women. She has been a member for more than 50 years.
The mountains became home. When asked what she would miss, the composure Carolyn had maintained through a long conversation disappeared.
“Oh, I cried,” she said. The tears still come quickly.
“I’ve managed to learn to put on a private front because I have cried so much,” she said. “We have been so happy here, so many friends.”
Then she summed up what the years in Estes Park meant in a sentence that had nothing to do with doctors, dementia, driving, or senior living facilities.
“I love the mountains,” Carolyn said. “I love every rock in our yard.”
Leaving Estes Park makes sense on paper. Their children and grandchildren will be nearby. Medical care will no longer require finding a ride down the mountain. And memory care will be available without another move to another community.
None of that makes leaving home easy. Carolyn has written about the transition from what she once could do to what she no longer can.
Leaving Estes Park is one more transition she never expected to make.
After 23 years, she is leaving the mountains she loves — and every rock in the yard.
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