Before she ever imagined living here, Pat Harkins used to visit Sunnyside as a volunteer. She and her husband, Tom, would help with events, meet residents, and quietly begin to understand what made the place different. It wasn’t just the view, though the mountains outside apartment 210—where her parents, Chuck and Phyllis Jones, eventually lived—were hard to beat. It was the way people treated one another. The way care was folded gently into the corners of daily life.
Phyllis and Charles moved in sometime in the mid-90s, after his health began to decline. They left behind their home in Massanutten for something smaller, simpler, and steadier. “They loved it,” Pat said. “They found their people here.” One of those people, Marvel Dunn, still lives at Sunnyside. She and her husband used to have dinner with Phyllis and Charles every night.
When her parents moved into that apartment, Pat Harkins didn’t know she’d one day live just one floor above them. She and Tom spent more than two decades in a villa on campus before deciding it was time for a change. The apartment upstairs from her parents’ old place came open. “It felt right,” she said. “We knew how well it had worked for them.”
They knew because they’d watched it happen. Over the years, Phyllis and Charles moved through every stage of care Sunnyside offers—first independent living, then assisted living, and eventually healthcare. When they transitioned to assisted living, they were given two rooms down the hall from one another. But staff made it possible for them to stay close: one room became their bedroom, while the larger, brighter room served as their shared living space. It was through this thoughtful arrangement that Pat Harkins began to notice how much her father had been leaning on her mother, and how seamlessly the transition unfolded with the support of the Sunnyside team. “They made it work,” she said. “They always did.”
There was no single moment when Pat Harkins decided she’d follow in their footsteps. But the decision came quietly, then all at once. “We always felt when the time is right and the right place is available, you move. The apartment in the Highlands was perfect for us – so we grabbed it.”
Her sister, Barbara Mancini, joined them in 2018, leaving behind Northern Virginia traffic and cost for something slower, closer, easier. Together, the three of them navigated the pandemic, leaning on each other in a way that felt both new and familiar. Family, remade.
Toward the end of our conversation, Pat stood up and retrieved a small statue from a case nearby. It’s a piece their great aunt brought back from the Paris Exposition in 1878—ivory-faced, glass-eyed, preserved in time. “Barbara and I always said it looked just like Mom when she was little,” she said, turning it gently in her hands. “There’s just something about it.”
She posed for a photo with it, holding it carefully near her heart. No frame, no portrait, no caption needed—just the shape of memory made tangible. In that moment, the past and present folded into one another: mother and daughter, both at home at Sunnyside.
