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.