She stayed for thirty days. She stayed for a year.

“When you get older, you are often forgotten, abused, set aside, discarded, or ignored. I watched it happen. I wasn’t willing to look away.” — Greg Wilson, Founder, Senior Affair Magazine

A knock on a motel room door

It was 2020. The world had locked down, borders had closed, and most of us were trying to make sense of a pandemic we were told would be brief. We were living in Malibu, California — in a property owned by a business associate — when that associate asked us a quiet favor. His elderly aunt, a Canadian woman named Sandy Robinson, was living nearby. He couldn’t get to her; crossing the border meant two weeks of quarantine in each direction. Could we check on her?

We found Sandy in a motel. She was sharing a room with her adult son and his girlfriend. They were days from being evicted. She was in her seventies, sharp and warm and completely overlooked by the systems that were supposed to catch her. Her nephew asked if she could stay with us — just thirty days, while we found her an apartment nearby. Covid would be over soon. Everyone said so.

Sandy Robinson stayed for a year.

What that year looked like

She couldn’t climb stairs without help. She couldn’t step over the edge of a bathtub, so she couldn’t bathe independently. She needed a bowl brought to her at night to clean her dentures. As a Canadian citizen, her pension arrived in Canadian dollars that had to be manually converted, and her provincial health coverage created a tangle of problems inside the American medical system. We helped her shop, cooked every meal, sat with her through doctors’ appointments, managed her banking logistics, and learned — faster than we expected — how many invisible gaps exist between what older adults need and what the world provides.

Despite everything — the displacement, the dependency, the indignity of relying on strangers for things she’d done independently her whole life — Sandy Robinson was the most gracious person we had ever lived with. She made the best of every single day. She was curious, funny, grateful, and present.

She shared a birthday with our daughter Mia: April 1. From the day we met her until her death in 2025, we celebrated it together. Long after she left Malibu. Long after she was transported back to Canada following a serious bone infection in her feet. Long after she moved in with her daughter’s family and eventually transitioned to a care facility. Every April 1, we FaceTimed. She always asked about the kids by name.

In April 2025, Sandy didn’t pick up. We went searching on her Facebook page and found a family post — a quiet, loving goodbye. She had died the way too many seniors leave this world: without announcement, without fanfare, in the margins.

What Covid did to Sandy’s world

Before the pandemic, Sandy Robinson had a full life. Her social world centered on her church — friends, community, structure, belonging. Covid didn’t just disrupt that. It destroyed it. The fear of bringing the virus home kept seniors away from the very people and places that gave them purpose. By the time restrictions lifted, those connections had atrophied. Many never came back.

Sandy’s isolation was not exceptional. It was the rule. We are still living with the social aftermath of what those years did to an entire generation of older adults — and the loneliness, the cognitive decline, the financial vulnerability that followed.

Why we built Senior Affair

Senior Affair Magazine launched in 2020 — while Sandy was still living with us, while we were still figuring out her pension conversion and her bathtub situation and her insurance gaps. We built it because there was no single, trustworthy, free resource that brought together the full picture of what aging actually involves: the health decisions, the financial realities, and the deeply human questions of identity, purpose, and dignity.

We organize everything around three pillars — Health, Wealth, and Self — because those are the three domains where seniors and caregivers most urgently need honest, researched, clearly presented information. We don’t charge for access. We don’t hide content behind a membership wall. The site is supported entirely by affiliate relationships and sponsorships from brands we vet. The people we serve never pay for what we produce.

We do the research. We curate the options. We present them clearly.

That promise came directly from a year of learning, the hard way, what older adults actually need — and how hard it is to find that information when the clock is running.

We miss you, Sandy.

Senior Affair Magazine · Founded 2020 · Free resource for adults 55+ and their caregivers