BY ANN HEDREEN
From Judith Mayotte’s floor-to-ceiling, south-facing window on the 6th floor of the Skyline Retirement Community on Seattle’s First Hill, you can see the raised-bed gardens on the ground below. They are the work of a group of Skyline residents who call themselves the “Late Bloomers.” Mayotte enjoys looking down on the garden, quiet though it is on this February day. It’s one of the many things she appreciates about Skyline, where she has lived for six years.
But Mayotte is no late bloomer. She’s more of a continual bloomer. After a long career of working on refugee issues as a speaker, writer, professor, and advisor to presidents and international NGOs—that’s the extremely short version—Mayotte, who is 87, is far from done. She is now focused on climate change and the role it is playing in the worldwide refugee crisis. This fall, she gave a series of four talks on climate issues at St. James Cathedral called, “Living Neighbor Love Through Caring for Creation in a Changing Climate.”
And that brings up another thing Mayotte loves about Skyline—its location on First Hill, where she can use her “EV,” aka her electric wheelchair, to get her nearly anywhere she’d like to go, from World Affairs Council gatherings downtown to Benaroya Hall to Seattle University, where she has been a frequent guest speaker in History Professor Tom Taylor’s class on genocide in the modern world.
“When students hear her, they’re just always in awe,” says Taylor. “It’s her life story, as well as her enthusiasm. So as a selfish teacher, who is always trying to get students engaged,” he says Mayotte’s willingness to speak to his classes has been a powerful and inspiring gift.
Mayotte has been traveling via wheelchair since 1993, when she lost her leg, and very nearly her life, in a freak accident in southern Sudan (now South Sudan). She knew the region well because she had spent time there researching her 1992 book, Disposable People? The Plight of Refugees, and she was there at the time on behalf of Refugees International. Suddenly, a plane carrying emergency food and supplies flew in off-target for an aerial drop and she was hit by 200 pounds of bagged grain. Her days of traveling to remote refugee camps were over. But, as she put it, “The bags of grain didn’t hit my head, they hit my leg, and it was my bad polio leg, thank heavens, that got knocked off instead of my good leg. And,” she added, with absolute sincerity, “a lot of good things came out of it.”
She served as an advisor on refugees to the Clinton administration. And Professor Taylor hired her to teach at Seattle University. They became good friends. When Taylor and his wife adopted their daughter Alina from Kazakhstan, they asked Mayotte to be her godmother. Mayotte left Seattle to teach at Marquette University, her alma mater, where she was awarded the Women’s Chair in Humanistic Studies. She went on to lead several international study programs, includingthe Desmond Tutu Peace Center and Leadership Academy in Capetown, South Africa, where she lived for seven years.
When she returned to the U.S., she vowed that she would never live in a “place like this with old people,” and instead bought a three-bedroom condo in Washington, D.C., thinking that the third bedroom could be for a caregiver, at some distant point in the future when she might need one. But she was astonished to see that several relatives and friends, many of whom had made the same kind of vow, were now thriving in retirement complexes. She began to think hard about the value of living in community. After all, it was something she had done before, much earlier in her life, when she spent 11 years as a nun: first with the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, then with the Maryknoll Sisters.
Her Seattle friends encouraged her to return to the Pacific Northwest. She had already fallen in love with its natural beauty, but even more importantly, she realized it would make sense to be in a living situation where she could quickly make new friends, and easily see friends she already knew, like the Taylors.
“I’ve never been a person who’s planned in my life. So, I can’t say I did a lot of research,” Mayotte says. “I didn’t know anything about a CCRC or anything like that. I didn’t know how good it actually is.” A CCRC, or Continuing Care Retirement Community (or Life Plan Community) is a long-term residential option for older people who want to stay in the same place through different phases of the aging process. Skyline is what is known as a Type A Life Care community, which allows residents to age in one community, with rates predetermined for future health care needs, for as long as care is needed.
Mayotte, who is widowed and has no children, appreciates knowing that if or when she needs to, she can move to Skyline’s assisted living or skilled nursing wings, either temporarily—while healing from surgery, for example—or permanently.
But until that time comes, she is swimming laps every morning, and enjoying Skyline’s full calendar of lectures, classes, concerts, good meals, and lively conversations around the dinner table. She has pitched in on several resident committees, and volunteered up the street at St. James’ meal program. There’s a spirit at Skyline, she says: “I don’t know exactly what it is, but you feel a sense of community. You feel a sense of cohesiveness.”
When I asked her whether there was any downside at all to her current living situation, she paused for several seconds, before commenting that the costs of CCRCs are high and that she feels fortunate to be able to live at Skyline. But she couldn’t think of any other negatives.
“I just like getting up in the morning and having a full day. I really don’t have a down side. For me. I just feel privileged to be here,” Mayotte says. “But I feel like my whole life has been privileged, too.”
Contrary to what she might have imagined a decade or two ago, it turns out that living in an urban retirement community like Skyline, with its many resources, fits Mayotte’s engaged and outwardly focused lifestyle remarkably well.
Her friend Taylor concurs. “She’s just a person who feels engaged with the world. She feels that she has a strong desire to do what she can still do, and she goes at it.”
Ann Hedreen is an author (Her Beautiful Brain), teacher of memoir writing, and filmmaker. Ann and her husband, Rustin Thompson, own White Noise Productions and have made more than 150 short films and several feature documentaries together, including Quick Brown Fox: An Alzheimer’s Story. She is currently at work on a book of essays and is a regular contributor to 3rd Act Magazine, writing about topics including conscious aging, retirement, mindfulness, and health.