When Sheila Klein and Debby Gerber moved to NewBridge on the Charles in 2009, they arrived alone.
“I came here not knowing a soul, not knowing even how to find a grocery store,” Klein said.
“I came from Sharon. And I didn’t know anybody when I came here,” said Gerber, who found that there are a lot of couples at NewBridge, the large, ambitious senior housing campus from Hebrew SeniorLife. “In fact, I was absolutely amazed to find so many couples here.”
But Gerber and Klein found a friendship with each other – and support from a NewBridge social group with a catchy name, Flying Solo.
The support and social group, which has been meeting at NewBridge for over a year, is an opportunity for women who live alone to come together, facilitator Elana Kling Perkins said.
There are women at NewBridge who have never been married, who have been divorced, and who are widowed, she said. The group has talked about all sorts of topics, but by and large “they don’t do a lot of looking back together. They’re really focused on their current situations, their current lives and relationships.”
Couples have a partner to do things with or eat with – but for single women, mealtime is the most stressful time.
“We’ve had many discussions about dining alone. If you want to be alone, if you don’t want to be alone,” Kling Perkins said. “Some people have the same group of people they sit with every single night, and other people want more variety.”
As Gerber put it, “eating alone is difficult.”
“If you’re single, you have to walk in and you either sit by yourself or talk to somebody,” she said.
She lost her husband 12 years ago; Klein said she has been alone for 10 years.
They both have big extended families, however. Klein has two children (including a daughter in Sharon) and three grandchildren, and Gerber has four children and nine grandchildren. Her children live in Cambridge, Brookline and Needham.
Klein came from Connecticut to NewBridge right after it opened in mid-2009, while Gerber moved to Dedham in September 2009.
The two women met when they sat next to each other one night at a meet-and-greet. They are seniors, but “we’re actually kids here” compared to average NewBridge residents in their mid-80s, Gerber said.
Since they’ve met, they say, they’ve learned about each other’s Boston and Brooklyn accents.
When Sheila Klein and Debby Gerber moved to NewBridge on the Charles in 2009, they arrived alone.
“I came here not knowing a soul, not knowing even how to find a grocery store,” Klein said.
“I came from Sharon. And I didn’t know anybody when I came here,” said Gerber, who found that there are a lot of couples at NewBridge, the large, ambitious senior housing campus from Hebrew SeniorLife. “In fact, I was absolutely amazed to find so many couples here.”
But Gerber and Klein found a friendship with each other – and support from a NewBridge social group with a catchy name, Flying Solo.
The support and social group, which has been meeting at NewBridge for over a year, is an opportunity for women who live alone to come together, facilitator Elana Kling Perkins said.
There are women at NewBridge who have never been married, who have been divorced, and who are widowed, she said. The group has talked about all sorts of topics, but by and large “they don’t do a lot of looking back together. They’re really focused on their current situations, their current lives and relationships.”
Couples have a partner to do things with or eat with – but for single women, mealtime is the most stressful time.
“We’ve had many discussions about dining alone. If you want to be alone, if you don’t want to be alone,” Kling Perkins said. “Some people have the same group of people they sit with every single night, and other people want more variety.”
As Gerber put it, “eating alone is difficult.”
“If you’re single, you have to walk in and you either sit by yourself or talk to somebody,” she said.
She lost her husband 12 years ago; Klein said she has been alone for 10 years.
They both have big extended families, however. Klein has two children (including a daughter in Sharon) and three grandchildren, and Gerber has four children and nine grandchildren. Her children live in Cambridge, Brookline and Needham.
Klein came from Connecticut to NewBridge right after it opened in mid-2009, while Gerber moved to Dedham in September 2009.
The two women met when they sat next to each other one night at a meet-and-greet. They are seniors, but “we’re actually kids here” compared to average NewBridge residents in their mid-80s, Gerber said.
Since they’ve met, they say, they’ve learned about each other’s Boston and Brooklyn accents.
“I’m learning to pahk my car,” Klein joked. “We have a lot of fun.”
Also, “I very often eat with Debby,” she noted. “We don’t (have to) eat together, but we usually do.”
At Flying Solo, they have heard program speakers that have included staffers from the kitchen and security. “She tries to think of things that people are concerned about,” Klein said of Kling Perkins, whose title is community care advisor.
Kling Perkins said the group started meeting once a month, but after about a year the group decided to meet twice a month. Sometimes there are 25 women, and sometimes there are 10.
She said when began working at NewBridge soon after it opened, it became clear to her “that the experience of couples and the experience of singles who were moving in was different” – and she thought “that the support of other women would be helpful in the transition, to help settle in here.”
Many discussions in the early months were about navigating that transition, she said, and one important way group members helped each other was by hearing that other people found the adjustment challenging as well.
Flying Solo has been a forum for lighter and heavier topics.
“Women alone are more sensitive to security issues than the couples,” Kling Perkins said. Another interesting discussion recently was about whether to wear a wedding ring. “Some people took it off right away, some people never intend to. That was a very nice sharing moment.”
Gerber still wears her wedding and engagement rings, which were combined into one. Her husband’s company, Gerber Electronics, was right off of Route 1 in Dedham years ago, near where Costco is now. It later moved to Norwood.
Klein still wears her small diamond engagement ring, but not her wedding ring.
“I took it off. I said I’m not married anymore, and that’s that,” she said.
She said she has made several very good friends and a lot of acquaintances in her year and a half at NewBridge – after the hard experience of “leaving the people you know who saw you when your babies were being born, and when your husband was having troubles.”
Gerber noticed that a woman whose husband just died was walking by in the hallway.
“It’s being here, and you’re not alone,” she said of NewBridge. “She’s flying solo now, but she won’t feel as alone as probably we did.”
“You come down and you have someone to sit with,” she added.
Gerber agreed with Klein that it stinks to lose your partner – but said people at NewBridge have somebody to lean on, so it’s a little easier.
“If we need to, if we want to, we have somebody to talk to,” she said. “We don’t need to burden our children. We can burden ourselves.”
“Debby, I need you!” Klein chimed in, laughing heartily.
Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.
