Month: March 2026

Last Days – “When the Cranes Fly South”

Have you ever wondered what your last days will look like?  For most people, death is a process and not a moment.  Authors have tried to capture that experience – one thinks of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych – but not from experience.  Jorge Borges tries to image meeting his own dying self in “August 25, 1983.” No one gets to look back on their own end times; few of us can reliably predict when it will happen.  Borges was off by three years to the good.

I am often skeptical about books about old age, books with elderly protagonists, which are written by young people.  But Lisa Ridzén’s novel, When the Cranes Fly South, rings true.  The author says that she was inspired by the case notes she found from her grandfather’s carers during the end of his life.  She gives us what feels like a true picture of the messiness, the inevitability, and the release of death.  It is a lovely book.  I was also deeply impressed by the Swedish health care/home care system, which faithfully provides for visits four times a day.  The carers feed the grandfather, take care of the dog, bring in firewood – and generally do whatever is necessary to put an old man’s mind to rest.

But, of course, the old man’s mind does not rest, he does not go easy into that good night.  His wonderful canine companion, Sixten, is a large elkhound and the subject of controversy with Hans, his son, who thinks it is not fair to the dog or the caregivers to confine the dog with a sick old man.  Hans also insists that his father (Bo) take regular visits to his wife, who is in the deep haze of dementia and has been in a memory care home for a couple of years.  Bo can see no point in visiting the “husk” of his lifelong love, and when his poor wife throws them out of her room at the care home, we sympathize with Bo, who knows enough to keep memories separate from the current realities of his life.  Bo preserves one of his wife’s favorite scarves in a canning jar, so that he can occasionally open it to get a whiff of how she used to smell and think about how things used to be.  He loves his wife; he treasures his memories.  In his weakened state, he cannot reconcile the reality of her dementia with the warm feeling he gets every time he opens the canning jar.

Two of the passages which rang true for me had to with Hans, Bo’s son.  Hans is trying to do right by his father while working a demanding job and mourning the end of his marriage.  Bo wishes he could help Hans put all these challenges into perspective:

Despite everything, I wish there was something I could say to help Hans.  To make him realize he can stop stressing.  Maybe he would stop thinking about Sixten if he just relaxed a little.  But I don’t know what I can do about his restlessness.

Bo thinks about the fact that Hans will be in his place someday, dying and at the mercy of his daughter and the caregivers:

How will he react when Ellinor [Hans’s daughter] tells him he is no longer capable of taking care of himself?  Who will he be once he stops working, once his body  starts to give up the way they always do?   Right then, I realize that he might end up like you [Bo’s wife/Hans’ mother], forgetting Ellinor and drifting from one day to the next, and I pull a face and shake my head.

Of course, Hans cannot imagine himself in his father’s place, but the truth is that both things – the stress today and the inevitability of aging tomorrow – are related.  If death and old age were constant companions, were realized as inevitabilities, perhaps the stresses of the present moment would diminish in proportion.

This book was a huge bestseller and award-winner in Sweden.  Recently, I wrote about the Swedish bestseller about “death cleaning.”  Clearly, Swedish readers are eager for real discussions about old age and preparations for the end of life.  This is to their credit.  When the Cranes Fly South is not an easy book in some ways; death is often messy and Ridzén gives us clear images of incontinence, falls, nostalgia, grief – losses of all kinds.  We get the picture of a man who knows he has to leave, but clings to those things that give his life meaning – his dog, his woods, the scent of his wife’s scarf – as long as he can.  While we feel for him and with him, he is not an object of pity by the reader, by his caretakers, or by himself.

For most of the book, we are in Bo’s head.  Again, I was suspicious of a first novel by a 36-year-old which tried to enter the mind of a dying 89-year-old.  Who am I to say if it is accurate?  But it feels right, and it got me thinking about how I would handle my own last days, what needs to be discarded, and what needs to be held onto until the very end.  Highly recommended.

Death is a major (and the final) life event.  We have elaborate rituals for childbirth, fairy-tale weddings, graduations, and other major life events.  But it is much harder to orchestrate death.  In the Middle Ages, it was very important to have a “good death,” shriven of our sins, family around, comfortable in one’s own bed.  There was even a term for the art of ending your life well: ars moriendi.  By the seventeenth or eighteenth century, however, death had become a more private and hidden affair.  People today plan their funerals, create bucket lists, and do extensive estate planning, but do they think about their actual death?  Of course, it is not easy.  My husband was recently in the hospital again, and there is nothing more impersonal than a hospital.  But that is where a lot of dying happens.

We might start by trying to imagine what kind of death we would have, what we would want.  You might try, as Borges did, to write a story about the end of your life.  Where do you think you’ll be?  Who will be there?  What will you be thinking about?  We have little control about our dying, but conjuring up the end might give us a little more clarity on the things we can control.

In When the Cranes Fly South, Bo has a good death.  He has the people he loves around him and his hand on the head of his beloved elkhound.  “Everything is crystal clear,” he thinks.  At least, that is the way our author imagined it would happen.  May everything be “crystal clear” for you in your last moments.  I often wonder if, at that moment when everything extraneous fades away, we will see more clearly.  May it be so for all of us.

 

 

 

Spinoza of Market Street – “Forgive Me, I Have Become a Fool”

A week or so ago, I was googling a Spinoza citation (regular readers know I’m a big Spinoza fan), and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “The Spinoza of Market Street” popped up in my search results.  Now, I vaguely remember reading that story sometime in my distant past, but had no real recollection of it.   So, I pulled it up and was glad I did.

A digression here.  I am constantly amazed at how little I remember of things I read decades ago.  Unless I have reread or thoroughly studied the texts, I might be able to recall some themes, whether I liked the piece or not, a few memorable scenes or tidbits, who wrote it, but that’s about it.  It is a mixed blessing, as I can enjoy some really fine works as if for the first time.  I can even reread classic mystery writers like Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh.  But really – where did it all go?  What else has been lost over the years besides the knowledge of “who done it”?

Needless to say, the Singer story was “new” to me, and it made an overwhelming impression this time.  Truthfully, besides the memory problem, when I read it for the first time, I was not old and surely did not appreciate old age (or Spinoza) as I do now.  The story is about an elderly and impoverished man, Dr. Fischelson, who has spent his whole life studying Spinoza.  He has written notes and stupendous amounts of commentary, but – at the end of his life – he cloisters himself in a small attic room in Warsaw trying to make ends meet.  He has dedicated his life to trying to live the kind of life Spinoza recommended, to be the “free man” that Spinoza describes in his Ethics.  He has forgone marriage, children, regular employment for this ideal. 

Spinoza does not protect the aging scholar from the vagaries of life, however.  Dr. Fischelson gets deathly ill in his attic room, and would have succumbed had not his neighbor, an old crone called “Black Dobe,” suddenly needed someone to translate a letter she got from a relative in America.  Black Dobe is an aging spinster, described as “tall and lean, and black as a baker’s shovel.  She had a broken nose and there was a mustache on her upper lip.  She spoke with the hoarse voice of a man and she wore men’s shoes.”  And yet, this old crone nurses the Spinoza scholar back to health.  They talk to each other about their lives – for the first time in many years somebody is interested in what they have to say. Black Dobe knows nothing about Spinoza, but she cares about Fischelson’s childhood, about his thoughts.  And he reciprocates.  Eventually, they visit the Rabbi and say that they want to get married.  The people on Market Street are amazed and pack into the Rabbi’s chamber for the wedding.  The wedding night is better than expected.   “What happened that night could be called a miracle.  If Dr. Fischelson hadn’t been convinced that every occurrence is in accordance with the laws of nature, he would have thought that Black Dobe had bewitched him.”  Good for them.

But here’s the thing.  Dr. Fischelson thinks he has broken faith with Spinoza.  He has failed to lead the kind of “life based on reason” that Spinoza has recommended.  As the sun rises on the morning after his wedding night, the old, old man looks up at the sky and pleads, “Divine Spinoza, forgive me.  I have become a fool.” Is rationality really the answer or do the fools really have the answer in the end?  Does one preclude the other?  One thinks of the Death of Ivan Ilych and the happiness of the servant Gerasim as opposed to the severe angst of his dying master.  Is being in love with (or at least comforted by) an old ugly spinster a sin against Spinoza?  Surely not.

While Spinoza himself led a solitary life, it does not seem to have been lonely.   Spinoza boarded with a family, he had friends, he had a large correspondence with other philosophers.   And one point that Dr. Fischelson seems to have missed in modeling his life after Spinoza’s precepts, is that – above all – Spinoza believed in cheerfulness.  Other emotions could be tolerated as long as they were not in excess, but “of cheerfulness, there could be no excess.”

Fundamentalists, zealots of all kinds, tend to squeeze the joy out of life. There is no room for frivolous emotions in a single-issue mind. Dr. Fischelson was a zealot of Spinoza, but led a cheerless life.  He thinks he has failed in the end, but perhaps – for the first time – he has gotten it right.  Marrying Black Dobe was both a rational and joyful act.  One does not preclude the other.

And here’s the thing that got me.  When Black Dobe asks Fischelson why he doesn’t go to temple, he tells her that “God is everywhere.  In the synagogue, in this very room.  We ourselves are part of God.”  This completely frightens the old lady.  “Don’t say such things,” she tells him.  The odd thing is that he says them but does not act as if they are true, and Black Dobe is frightened by the very thought and yet treats even a dirty old man as if he were sacred.  Amen.

T. S. Eliot said it well in “East Coker”: “Do not let me hear /Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.”  Ah, yes.  And let us find reasons to be cheerful in our old age.

For a humorous look at love in old age, you might look at my stories, “Livability” or “The Case of the Missing Husband.”  For more of Spinoza, you could try an earlier blog, “Smile for Spinoza.” Be of good cheer.

An Old Gorilla Talks to An Old Lady

If you are close to my age, you might remember reading Ishmael when you were in your 30s or 40s.  The novel by Daniel Quinn won the Tomorrow Fellowship in 1992, a prize created by Ted Turner and awarded (only once) for fiction offering “creative and positive solutions to global problems.”  It is a readable book and lovely in its conception.

Ishmael is an elderly gorilla who communicates through telepathy and has a novel way of looking at human history and where “it all went wrong.”  He posits that mankind took a fatal turn when they turned into “Takers” rather than “Leavers,” several thousand years ago in the fertile crescent.  He retells the Genesis story as a prophecy of how humans started on a trajectory that would end up destroying humankind and much of the world around us.  He never mentions Faust, but it is definitely the story of a Faustian bargain – according to which we are granted the knowledge and mastery of our lives and of the earth.  Anything is permitted if it makes life easier for humans.  But, as in any Faustian bargain, there is a cost.

I was impressed with Ishmael in my 40s and am still intrigued and impressed in my 70s.  While you can argue with many of Quinn’s conclusions, Ishmael is a rare phenomenon – a totally fresh look at what humans call “progress.”  In these days of AI and a return to a nuclear arms race, I am thinking about this more and more.

The whole notion of progress is different when you are old.  At the time I first read Ishmael – still in my prime, raising kids, building a career, learning new technologies – my world was progressing and I was progressing too.  We all jogged, took up Pilates and yoga, ate yogurt, and were convinced that ours was the generation that would never age or turn into shrunken old people. In my 70s, I realize that – from a bodily standpoint and notwithstanding all our efforts to the contrary – progress is eventually replaced by regress. One hopes for plateaus rather than higher and higher levels of function – and one fears for the abyss. Whether or not the world around us is “progressing,” we are doing something else.

For the past few decades, we elders told ourselves that while we aren’t keeping up with technology (partly because we might not want to), we still had some basic skills and experience which had some worth – experience, verbal and mathematical literacy, a developed sense for human interaction.  Artificial intelligence seeks to replace those things, and while I still believe it cannot, there is some heavy betting that it can.

Our faith in the progress of the world around us has likewise been undermined by reality; “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.”  That is what Quinn’s book is about.  And when I read Ishmael again, I saw his argument from a much different standpoint.  I had gotten old and the world had gotten damaged.

Here is his argument (but please read the book).  At some point (and Quinn places that point ten millennia ago), humanity took a step in the wrong direction, mostly through the growth of what he calls aggressive agriculturalism – which led to one culture replacing other more sustainable cultures through the seizure of lands and spectacular population growth.  (There is much more to the story, of course.) And now the greatest threat we have as a species is…ourselves.  I would hardly call that progress.

Even for us Sputnik kids, science no longer looks like a source of unqualified progress – is AI an achievement or a threat?  Ecological damage which, truthfully, we were pretty blind to in the 1950s and 60s, has become so obvious that it is amazing that so many people are still resisting the facts.  The world population has progressed in numbers – from about 2.5 billion when I was born to over 8.3 billion (think about it!), but this can hardly be called progress by the millions scrambling for sustenance on this planet. But every time the notion of progress (as we have defined it since the Enlightenment) is challenged, our culture just doubles down.  Think of the denial of climate change or the recent disagreement between the Pentagon and Anthropic over whether there should be any guardrails on AI.

Chesterton complained that “Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”  Do we even have a vision? Is it a sustainable vision?  Are emotion and commerce (or more specifically commerce using the impetus of emotion) changing the goal to meet the product?  Spinoza said that progress happened when we went from being dominated by the emotions and were guided by the rational, by the thing that makes us human.  I have seen little sign of this lately.  And a couple of days ago we all woke up to the news of yet another war in the Middle East.  No matter how you define progress, it does not feel like this is it.

Early in Ishmael, there is this exchange between Ishmael (who speaks telepathically because, of course, gorillas can’t talk) and the unnamed narrator.  It is worth thinking about.

“Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”
“As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”
“And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don’t you stop?”
I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

Our “civilization system” is looking rocky from the perch of old age.  Our generation is grappling with its deeply rooted faith in progress in ways that previous generations maybe did not.

Once we could console ourselves with the thought that we had left our progeny a better world, even though our personal world and body were falling apart.  Our generation has no such consolation.  And we cannot comfort ourselves that it will be better for our children.  Our children are not doing as well as we were at their age, and it looks even worse for our grandchildren.  In general, they are not as well educated – language and math scores are at their lowest point in two decades – and their prospects for good jobs, home ownership, debt relief, and eventually a comfortable retirement, seem dim indeed.

And it is made worse by our cultish attachment to the concept of “progress.”  The stock market goes up, Silicone Valley comes out with a new gadget, we can stream anything anytime – we follow the breadcrumbs and never think that we might end up at the witch’s house.

Anyway, these were all things I thought about when I reread Ishmael in my old age, and I am pretty sure they were more coherent thoughts than I had when I first read it in my forties.  So maybe I have made some kind of progress.