by Grace Nasri
Nader Shabahangi, the CEO of five retirement homes in Northern California, says his assisted living centers treat the aged as still growing and maturing, not an over-the-hill gang rushing toward death.
“We talk about the prime of life. What the heck is that? When is that?” Shabahangi, 53, told the San Francisco Chronicle at one of his five AgeSong senior living centers in San Francisco and the East Bay.
“More and more research actually shows that we are continuing to mature and develop, especially emotionally and spiritually, until we die. So the whole decline metaphor, that we have reached our peak at a certain age, is a very biomedically-based approach. The idea of a wise elder who has gone through 70, 80, 100 years of living—you want to know what he or she is thinking.”
Shabahangi was born in San Jose, California, to an Iranian father and a German mother. When he was two, he and his family moved to Iran, and later to Germany. He traces his respect for and interest in his elders largely to his German grandfather.
“I grew up for quite a few years on my grandfather’s farm in Northern Germany, and we had a very close relationship,” Shabahangi told the Chronicle. “He was in some ways my idol, a loving, kind man who taught me how to run the farm. Throughout my whole teens—on Easter break and summer break and fall break—I would go to help with the harvest. The other kids thought I was crazy.”
But his constant moving around, combined with his unique background, made it hard for Shabahangi to always fit in with his peers. As a kid, Shabahangi moved several times: from California to Iran, from Iran to Germany, and later throughout Germany
“We were constantly on the go in my teenage years. I was still the dark-haired kid in a white, Teutonic Germany, and so there was this constant having to prove yourself—who are you and what are you doing here?”
But Shabahangi didn’t let the obstacles in his life hinder him; instead he quickly realized that people were different for several reasons, one being cultural differences. He said this stark difference among people meant, “Your perception of what is beauty and my perception can be quite different.”
Shabahangi moved back to Northern California when he was about 19 years old with plans of becoming a computer scientist. But, he said, “Working in Silicon Valley, I couldn’t picture myself in an office working for 40, 50 years on computers. I needed to be relating, I needed to be with people.”
So Shabahangi enrolled at San Francisco State University, where he pursued a master’s degree in computer technology and its impact on human development. After school, he spent a year in Paris contemplating.
“I had to ask myself the big question: ‘What am I going to do with my life?’” he said. “As an existentialist, you are what you do and not what you think you are. I looked around and what I was doing every day was sitting in cafes and talking with people, and I thought, ‘How do I make a living doing that?’“
He decided he would move back to the Bay Area to earn his license in psychotherapy. But after taking some classes, Shabahangi still didn’t feel he was pursing his goal in the proper way.
“Having grown up in all these complex environments, these three years of studying psychotherapy seemed very thin, not very deep, compared to how rich and complex people are. I decided I’ve got to really dig deep,” he said.
To better study the complex nature of human beings, Shabahangi decided he needed to study literature, poetry and philosophy. He did that at Stanford University, eventually earning his doctorate.
Around the same time, some of Shabahangi’s friends hired him to renovate a small elder care home they ran. In preparation, he visited several larger care homes and came back concerned about the state of the country’s seniors.
“When I was seeing those care homes in the mid-’90s, I peeked into the world of elder care, and it didn’t look very pretty to me,” he said referring to the institutional feel of typical senior living homes.
“I was really dismayed by how these elders were not really living in a jovial, joyous environment. They seemed tucked away, hidden away almost,” Sha-bahangi said.
“I was shocked at how the elderly were being treated in communities and nursing homes and wanted to make a difference. I wanted to create a place that would be caring and respectful for the elderly,” he said.
At that point, Shabahangi said he realized what his calling was. “Then it became a mission for me,” he said. “I just thought how much I learned from elders and then I thought, ‘My God, what an amazing resource that’s being taken away from us, or not being utilized as we are living in our increasingly fast-paced world.’”
Fifteen years later, the result is five communities, including a modern, concierge-style building opened this year in Emeryville, California.
“Our slogan is ‘Freedom to be,’ “ he said. “We don’t pathologize. I say this in the most loving and kind way possible, you can be as nutty as you want to be. Being this age is the flowering of our lives.”
