Couples with different health needs can now live together in some long-term care facilities

This avoids the added trauma for someone already in decline of abruptly being separated from a partner. “When a person moves, period, it’s a hard adjustment. If you move with your family

member, it’s so much easier,” says Sheryl Zimmerman, co-director of the Program on Aging, Disability and Long-Term Care at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social

Work. After all, says Mike McClernon, owner and advisor at Assisted Living Locators of Long Island in New York, “these are people who have spent 50 years or more together. They’ve been

waking up together every day.” On the downside, if a cognitive disorder causes the ill person to become disruptive, it can intrude on neighbors. And it can be draining for the spouse without

impairment to watch a loved one slowly get worse, up close. “It all depends on the character of the relationship, and if they really signed up for better or worse, the well spouse doesn’t

resent it,” McClernon says. Like the Gerlachs, Woody and Rita Franke “can’t imagine living separately,” says Woody, who is 80, as his wife was getting help from a home health aide in another

room. Rita, 79, has memory issues, and Woody needs dialysis three times a week. But after 59 years of marriage, he said, they’re grateful to remain together at The Providence, in Fairfax,

Virginia, another Watermark community, to which they moved last year from Texas to be closer to their daughters. Woody and Rita Franke Courtesy of Woody Franke “There’s always a chance that

she might have to go to memory care, but so far she hasn’t,” Woody says. And even if she does, it’s three floors below in the same building. Some assisted living communities don’t let

couples live together when one needs significant help with day-to-day activities. Most require residents with a dementia diagnosis to be transferred into memory care facilities, sometimes in

separate buildings on a campus. Though they can visit, spouses typically are not allowed to move with them. “Going across the bridge,” residents of some of these places jokingly call it.

This is slowly beginning to change. Like Watermark, the 10 Highgate Senior Living communities in Arizona,California, Montana and Washington State let couples with different needs live

together or close by, including in what it calls its “memory care neighborhoods.” At others it remains uncommon. At Erickson Senior Living’s 21 properties in 11 states, for instance, spouses

tend not to continue to live together after one requires higher-level nursing or memory care, a spokesman said.