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I've walked hundreds of assisted living hallways, ten years as a family advisor and twenty spent working inside my family's communities. Sometimes on a tour, ten feet from the administrator, there's a stain in plain sight, and I'll plant myself on top of it so the family doesn't see it before I can raise the issue privately.

Staff walk past stains so often, they stop registering. A family touring for the first time sees everything.

If it's not acceptable in a hotel, it's not acceptable in assisted living. The bar should be higher. That's why people pay $8,000 a month. Instead, too many communities quietly accept that "this just happens in senior living." It shouldn't.

These residents are women who spent 50 or 60 years meticulously keeping their own homes. Their kids chose the nicest community around, trusting Mom would be cared for to her own standard. Then there's a stain in the common area that's clearly been there for who knows how long.

What we did differently

We cleaned common-area carpet monthly and apartments quarterly. The real trick was smaller: a cheap pet-stain carpet extractor, and every staff member trained to clean stains in a perfect square. The square proved a stain had already been treated, so on tours I could point to it and say, "That's been addressed."

We also gamified it. Anyone who cleaned a stain wrote their name on a break-room sheet for a $100 gift card drawing. On the night cameras, I'd watch the graveyard shift hunting for stains. My maintenance man loved it: no more old messes waiting for him every morning.

Why this keeps happening

I still see it in beautiful new buildings in affluent areas. Usually, it's a maintenance man behind the front desk instead of walking the halls, a young administrator without an eye for detail, or a cheap management company with absentee owners.

Some of these communities would have waiting lists if they just took care of what they have. Families run into each other at church and get asked about Mom's senior community. "It's fine, but it could be cleaner" never gets written in a review, but it's the one that costs the sale.

I grew up in my family’s assisted living communities and worked in them for decades. In all that time, we never displayed obituaries or memorials in our lobbies. When funeral flower arrangements were donated, we broke them down and distributed the flowers to residents’ rooms.

That wasn’t because we were insensitive. It was because of who walks through the front door.

Picture the tour

Imagine you’ve been begging your dad to tour an assisted living community for months. He finally gives in, even though he’s convinced assisted living is where people go to die. You walk into the lobby together, and the first thing you see is a framed, typed-up obituary. Then a funeral arrangement.

Whatever trust you spent months building just took a hit. The last thing a family wants to be reminded of on a tour is death, and you’ve confirmed the fear he walked in with.

This isn’t about pretending death doesn’t happen

We cared deeply for our residents and formed real bonds with them. We held our own memorial services when a resident had no family. There were funerals where my father and I were the only pallbearers and the only people in attendance. We transported residents to funerals so they could say goodbye to their friends. Some residents clipped an obituary and stuck it on their refrigerator. I posted obituaries downstairs in our maintenance office.

Grief was never hidden from the people who needed it. It just wasn’t something we felt we had to advertise at the front desk.

Where memorials belong

Our communities were places where people came to keep enjoying life. Residents grieved on their own terms, with the friends they’d made. The lobby was for the living: the people who live there, and the families deciding whether it could be home.

I’ll go one step further, knowing it may ruffle some feathers. Sometimes a public display of obituaries can come across as performative, more about how the community wants to be seen than about the person who passed. Honoring a resident doesn’t require an audience of prospective families.

If you’re touring, here’s what I’d say

Notice how a community handles loss, but don’t assume that a lobby without memorials means they don’t care. Ask how they support residents when a friend passes, whether they hold services, and how they help staff and neighbors grieve. That tells you far more than a wall of frames ever could.

The best communities honor their residents privately and celebrate life publicly. That’s how we did it for over 35 years, and I’d do it the same way again. 

Back in 2010, when I was executive director of a memory care community, I made a decision some people questioned: our residents went on the same kinds of outings as the more independent assisted living residents next door.

Not movies or the symphony — nothing that needed a long attention span. Every week, we did a scenic drive and a lunch bunch outing. Twice a month, we added a destination field trip — the Air Force Base, Festival of Trees, minor league baseball games, the tulip festival, the pumpkin patch.

We built it around safety and connection. Every resident was paired with a staff volunteer, and they wore matching colored caps with name tags — resident's name on the volunteer's tag, volunteer's name on the resident's tag. It turned into one of the best team-building tools I've ever seen, and it deepened trust with families in a real way.

People often asked, "Why bother if they won't remember the outing?" My answer was always the same: we weren't doing it for the memory. We were doing it for the moment — for the staff, for the families, for the relationships being built right then.

There was another benefit I didn't expect. When a resident was agitated, flipping through our photo album of outings together often calmed them down faster than anything else — a gentler alternative to reaching for anxiety medication.

Sadly, when I visit communities today, I see residents who rarely get off the bus on their outings. It doesn't have to be that way.

My grandma, Doris, didn’t know what year it was and didn’t recognize some relatives, but she flourished in our assisted living community. She was not a flight risk; she had no behaviors causing her to act out, and the CNAs who took care of her were proactive in anticipating her daily routine. If I had decided Doris, with her mild dementia, needed to spend time in our memory care community, she would have realized that the folks around her were a little off and felt uncomfortable.  If residents can recognize they are in a dementia care community, I believe they should not be in a dementia care community.

 Don’t automatically start looking for a memory care community if your loved one receives a dementia diagnosis, and don’t always trust the view of an assisted living community nurse who may want to place your loved one in her memory care.

 Too often, I hear, “My dad was diagnosed with dementia, and his physician thinks we need to find a memory care facility for him.” While that might be the case, often a memory care is still a few years away, and traditional assisted living may be a better fit in making the person you love feel happier and more engaged with life. 

 

My grandma, Doris, didn’t know what year it was and didn’t recognize some relatives, but she flourished in our assisted living community. She was not a flight risk; she had no behaviors causing her to act out, and the CNAs who took care of her were proactive in anticipating her daily routine. If I had decided Doris, with her mild dementia, needed to spend time in our memory care community, she would have realized that the folks around her were a little off and felt uncomfortable.  If residents can recognize they are in a dementia care community, I believe they should not be in a dementia care community.

Don’t automatically start looking for a memory care community if your loved one receives a dementia diagnosis, and don’t always trust the view of an assisted living community nurse who may want to place your loved one in her memory care.

 Too often, I hear, “My dad was diagnosed with dementia, and his physician thinks we need to find a memory care facility for him.” While that might be the case, often a memory care is still a few years away, and traditional assisted living may be a better fit in making the person you love feel happier and more engaged with life.