Reader’s Digest International — August 2017

84 | August• 2017

AT HOME TOGETHER

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.

In turn, Jonatan Shaya, now 20, told

Taimi he’d been born in Tel Aviv of an

Israeli father and a Finnish mother

and had been living in Helsinki with

his mother and younger brother until

they moved to another town.

“I couldn’t go with them because

I’m in the middle of a course to

At 82, and confined to the wheel-
chair since a stroke in 2001 paralysed
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 ten-
tative smile appeared in her doorway.
She’d left it open, as she always did
in the morning.
“Hi! I’m your new neighbour across
the hall,” the young man said. “My
name’s Jona, short for Jonatan. Mind
if I come in?”
“Please,” she replied, at once curi-
ous 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 –

AIMI TASKINEN SETTLED INTO 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, Finland.

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.

WITH HIGH-COST

HOUSING AND HEALTH-

CARE SPENDING CUTS,

INTERGENERATIONAL

HOMES ARE HELPING

TO FILL THE GAP

PHOTO (PREVIOUS SPREAD): GOFFE STRUIKSMA