Meet Summer Jackson

Founder, Aging Well Navigator™ and Family Ready™

Certified Senior Advisor (CSA) | B.A. in Gerontology | Master’s in Management

Aging Isn’t the Problem. Lack of Preparation Is.

For more than 25 years, I’ve worked with older adults, adult children and families as they’ve moved through some of life’s hardest transitions.

Over and over, I’ve watched loving, responsible families, people who worked hard, saved for retirement and believed they’d done everything right, suddenly face decisions they never imagined. A parent falls. A diagnosis comes. An adult child becomes the person everyone calls. And almost overnight, life changes for the whole family.

So much of that confusion could be reduced if families had the chance to learn, talk and prepare before something happened. That belief has shaped my life’s work. Here’s where it began.

The Hospital Hallway

In 1995, when I was 36, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

My parents were responsible people. They had their legal documents in place, and we thought they’d done what they needed to do. But we were about to learn that having documents and being prepared aren’t the same thing.

My mother became ill while my parents were out of town. By the time my sister and I reached the hospital, we found my father wandering the hallway, unsure where she’d been taken. When we finally found her in intensive care, she was connected to all kinds of machines. I will never forget the look in her eyes, as if she were asking, “Why have you let them do this to me?”

Three days later, we had to decide whether to discontinue those interventions. We loved her and wanted to do the right thing, but we didn’t truly know what she wanted. We had never had those conversations, and her documents weren’t accessible when we needed them.

Looking back, I believe the seeds of my life’s mission were planted in that hospital.

The Adult Children Outside My Office

In 1999, I became the administrator of a retirement community of about 110 older adults. Within weeks, adult children were lining up outside my office, worried and frightened about their parents. They didn’t know where to begin, or even what questions to ask.

I saw myself in them.

Over the years, I saw how hard it can be for a parent to leave a home full of memories and independence. I saw that moving Mom or Dad didn’t end the challenges. Sometimes it was just the beginning. Medication mix-ups, dehydration, falls, infections. A hospital stay, then rehab, then home again, and often the cycle would start over.

Meanwhile, their adult children, usually in their 40s and 50s with careers, spouses and children of their own, were leaving work, traveling back and forth and trying to coordinate everything with little or no preparation.

I wasn’t seeing this happen to one family. I was seeing it happen to many families, often at the same time. And I kept asking: Why are we waiting until families are in crisis to help them understand what they need to know?

Searching for a Better Way

I co-founded Professionals Caring for Seniors, a nonprofit in Northern California, and served as its president for five years as it grew to about 150 professional members. I also served on the board of an Area Agency on Aging.

We helped many people. But I noticed something: the attorney handled the documents, the financial advisor handled the money, and healthcare and senior living professionals each handled their part. Every piece mattered, but no one was helping families see how it all fit together, or helping them prepare before something happened.

In the fall of 2004, home sick on my couch, it all came together. We were asking adult children to learn about aging, caregiving, finances, housing, legal authority and healthcare almost overnight, at the very moment they were most frightened and overwhelmed. We needed to turn the whole approach around.

That day, I knew what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing: helping families approach aging proactively. Not out of fear, but because preparing ahead helps parents keep the life they want, and helps their adult children avoid having their own lives turned upside down.

Never Giving Up on the Mission

The 2008 financial crisis set back my first effort to build a proactive aging model, but I never stopped believing in it. I continued working across financial planning, real estate, insurance and estate planning. In 2010, I became a caregiver for a friend who moved into my home and used a wheelchair, and I learned firsthand what caregiving asks of a person, day after day.

I also went back to school, earning my bachelor’s degree in gerontology at 54 and my master’s degree in management at 58.

Through all of it, one thing kept being reinforced: we have wonderful professionals for each piece of aging, but families need help connecting those pieces and preparing for the realities of living longer.

Why I Created Aging Well Navigator™ and Family Ready™

Today, that mission has become the Aging Well Navigator™ and Family Ready™, a holistic approach that brings together everything I’ve learned.

Family Ready™ helps families look at the areas of life that change as we age: legal documents and wishes, home safety, care choices and family responsibilities, financial preparedness, health, and protection against scams and fraud.

Think of it like having a trusted guide on a trip you’ve never taken before. You still make the decisions. But you’re not reading the map alone, guessing at every turn, or finding out too late that you missed something important.

The unexpected may still happen. But a prepared family is in a much better position to respond, together.

One Generation at a Time

When adult children help their parents prepare, something else happens too. They learn what they want to do differently for their own children. Someday, you may be the 75-year-old parent. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your children already knew what you wanted, and where to find everything?

I can’t change what happened to my family in 1995. But I can take what I learned there, and from decades of walking alongside other families, and help people prepare differently.

My hope is that one day, families won’t have to learn how aging works in the middle of an emergency.

Aging isn’t the problem. Lack of preparation is. And together, we can change that, one family, one conversation, one generation at a time.