Local to the Salt Lake Valley, city by city

West Jordan is home. Cory lives here, his kids grew up here, and most weeks he's meeting a family somewhere between Gardner Village and the 9000 South corridor.

Murray sits at the center of the valley, and a lot of Salt Lake County's care decisions get made in the hallways of Intermountain Medical Center.

Many Cottonwood Heights parents have been in the same house at the mouth of the canyons for four decades. Leaving it is not a logistics problem — it's a grief problem with a logistics layer on top.

Salt Lake City has the most options in the state and, for that reason, the most confusing landscape. Downtown high-rise senior living, Avenues bungalows, university medicine, and the VA hospital are all within a few miles of each other.

Draper families tend to call earlier than most. Often nothing has gone wrong yet — a daughter has simply noticed her mother repeating herself, and wants to understand the options before there's a crisis.

Sandy has one of the largest concentrations of assisted living and memory care in the valley. That's a good thing and a complicating thing — the quality range between two communities a mile apart can be enormous.

In Riverton, more than most places in the valley, the parent is already living with — or right next door to — an adult child. That changes the question from "where should mom go?" to "how do we keep doing this?"

South Jordan spans two very different worlds: Daybreak's newer walkable neighborhoods and the older established parts of the city where families have been for generations.