Strangers

Health experts are adamant that maintaining strong social connections is key for healthy aging.

Loneliness and social isolation contribute to depression, anxiety, as well as increased risk of suicide, dementia, stroke and heart attacks, reports Mayo Clinic. 

The elderly are not the only ones feeling loneliness.

In Five-Star Stranger by Kat Tang, a young man works for an online rent-a-companion service, well paid for standing in as dates, friends and even father to a little girl with a distracted, insecure single mother. The mother has paid Stranger for years to stand in as father to the intelligent and somewhat neglected girl, on the cusp of becoming a teenager. The time commitment is one day per week, and his storyline: He works as a long-haul trucker. 

That relationship is shocking but understandable as Stranger was the child of a single mother dedicated more toward her failed acting career than her role as mother. Stranger didn’t finish high school and has few skills except for good looks and an amiable personality flexible for most client scenarios. He excels at his work, hence the novel's title. He balances long-term connections with suitable cool distance, likely atoning for past transgressions and his mother’s suicide. Adept at providing people with the services they need, Stranger surely would have relished a stand-in father who would have helped with homework and offered guidance on everyday problems: “Wasn’t the staid performance of love and care everything anyone really wanted? Did deeper feeling have to exist for the act to have meaning?” 

Stranger also sees his line of work as another reflection of “the trashed decadence of an overfattened empire poised for its inevitable fall.” 

Friendship can turn on and off like a faucet, and Stranger mulls over the meaning of such relationships, wondering if it’s all an attempt to dodge loneliness: “In school, friendship was an incidental by-product of liking the same movies or being good at kicking a ball on a grassy field. Rarely did we take care of one another… but still stuck together because we didn’t want to be alone. But now, as adults, people chose friendship – this fickle arrangement that could be taken away at any time without recourse.” 

Problems ensue when Stranger mixes two clients, the young girl who trusts him as her father and a woman who’s struggling with writing assignments and relies on him for role playing. The threesome heads off to the zoo, and suddenly, “Somehow, we were more of a family with the addition of one female stranger than we had been without – a feminine power.” Darlene, the writer, actually pretending to be a paternal aunt, fascinates the little girl who wants more, and Stranger must handle a fake daughter corresponding with a fake aunt.  

The writer condemns the pretend-parenting as wrong, and threatens to expose the charade even as Stanger contemplates trying for a relationship with the girl’s mother in order to have a daughter. His narrative breaks down and the girl’s mother breaks off contact, accusing him of being a parasite. “You prey off people’s insecurities. You don’t let them change or grow. You want them to be weak, to depend on people like you.” 

Afterward, Stranger sets out to learn more about his own mother and confronts the purpose of his life, realizing he must decide if he wants to keep pretending at relationships or take a risk by proving his existence and pursuing the real thing, good or bad. 

Back to aging and isolation, Senior Navigator offers tips for staying socially connected. And sometimes companions can be rented, as one family did when an aunt suddenly became incapacitated and landed in a nursing home a few hundred miles away. The family heard that that nursing home staff pay more attention to patients with involved family members. So the family paid a woman and child to visit each Wednesday or Thursday, bringing milkshakes and standing in as family. Two nieces also visited regularly, at least every other weekend. 

Simple and regular companionship can be a treasure. The aunt was pleased with the visitors, whether friends or strangers.

Burrow

At the start of the COVID pandemic, in the midst of lockdown, a family is devastated after the loss of an infant daughter in The Burrow by Melanie Cheng. The surviving daughter, Lucie, expresses interest in a pet and the family adopts a small, timid rabbit. Immediately afterward the hospital calls to report that Lucie's maternal grandmother suffered a fall, breaking an arm. The woman needs a place to stay while healing and that ends an estrangement that began after the infant died while in the grandmother’s care.

Conversations are stilted and cool and weapons, with individuals taking turns being predators or prey. The adults, each shouldering overwhelming guilt, struggle between masking feelings and being honest about their true thoughts. 

Each yearns to care again.   

The father, Jin, is an emergency physician who regrets becoming a “follower of procedures. An automaton. Which was better for the patients, who had more to gain from a clear-thinking robot than from someone whose judgment was clouded with feeling…. Jin missed the sensation of being emotionally invested in an outcome. He missed the fear and the worry. He missed caring about something.” 

Amy, the mother, an author who on a book tour when her daughter died, is conflicted about performative style of parenting required her child’s school.  Torn inside, she resents other mothers, smug and superior and shallow with their priorities. “The entire ecosystem depended on people caring about what other parents thought of them.” After her child’s death, “Amy learnt that not caring was a kind of superpower. It provoked people.”

She agonizes how she resented the baby for interfering with her writing, yet struggles to comfort or cherish her other daughter.

Lucie, the 10-year-old, is intelligent and anxious about her death, her parents' unhappiness and an inability to make close friends at school. But she adores her rabbit, often lying still as though dead, to trigger the shy animal’s curiosity. “Human beings, it seemed to Lucie, lacked curiosity about the world. A curiosity that rabbits had in endless supply.” 

Each character wants to hide from others, yet by the book's end the three adults, very much unlike rabbits, confront one another with true feelings.

I started this book as fires raged in Pacific Heights and Altadena, California, destroying at least 12,000 homes. An opening quotation from The Burrow, Franz Kafka’s unfinished story, stunned me the morning of January 8: “The most beautiful thing about my burrow is the stillness. Of course, that is deceptive. At any moment it may be shattered and then all will be over.”  

A life, beautiful or not, can vanish in a tragic instant and others recklessly move on. Security is a delusion.     

Regrets and secrets

Hang onto every day as precious – that’s the theme of both The Life Impossible by Matt Haig and Sandwich by Catherine Newman. Both writers point out that each of us, at this moment, is both the oldest and youngest we’ll ever be. “If only we could always have the perspective of the future with us as we live that present,” one protagonist notes. Attitudes on age can be adjusted with new experiences.  

Both novels address aging and struggling with painful memories and regrets. In both, the protagonist has traveled to a vacation community – an inherited and modest Ibiza home in the first and a rented cottage on Cape Cod in the second. Secrets and new aspirations spill from the female protagonists. Both books engage the reader from the start, Sandwich with slapstick humor and Impossible Life with intrigue.

In Sandwich Rocky spends the week at the rickety Cape rental cabin with her husband, adult children who also welcome her elderly parents for two days. Rocky is gregarious, fun, and a tad narcissistic and frequently toys with the notion of seeking divorce from her generally capable husband who prides himself on not apologizing and manages to “look away from anything you don’t want to see.” The two argue often and playfully, and Rocky limits the secrets she shares with him. 

The boisterous family, constantly bantering, attract attention wherever they go – the beach, shops, or restaurants. The son’s girlfriend compares her large family with Rocky’s, describing them as fun and chaotic, but not “so … intentional the way you guys always seem.” 

Rocky cherishes the memories triggered by the annual stays at the cottage and enjoys hearing her children complain about the conveniences and décor.  “People insist you should be grateful instead of complaining? They maybe don’t understand how much gratitude one might feel about the opportunity to complain.” 

The Life Impossible is a darker book about a woman who mulls over regrets from years before. “The trouble with tragedy is that it tars everything that comes after,” observes Grace Winters, a retired math teacher, in her seventies, for whom the “unknown variable must always be found.”  She finds a theme in all she meets and identifies her own theme as guilt. She finds comfort in blaming herself for the death of a young son followed by an affair and cheating on a beloved husband: “Grief felt like the only way to keep close to them” and she sees “everyone on Earth as someone’s grief waiting to happen.” 

Two events at the start trigger motivation for Grace who who depressingly concedes, “I feel like I have a life inside me that needs to be lived and I am not living it.”  

First, Grace receives a distressing note from a former student about his own hardships, and the rest of the book follows as her response, self-analysis that she hopes will be useful. Maurice does not appear in the novel other than sending another note, and Grace strives to be both blunt and kind. “Sometimes in order to be helpful we have to give up the desire to be liked.”  She recalls Maurice, especially his propensity to say sorry for things he had not done.  “It is like an admission that everyone in the world is a little to blame for everything.” 

She becomes more accepting of her past, explaining that “one good thing about having regrets is that I no longer judge others too harshly.” And she warns him against “incredibly common” worry: “Along with loneliness it is the polluted air that most minds live in, the ting that deprives us of the present moment, trapping us in the past and future all at once.” 

Grace also receives notice from a law firm. An acquaintance from the start of both their teaching careers bequeathed Grace a small home on a busy roadway in Ibiza. Grace knew Christine briefly, opening her home one lonely Christmas night and encouraging the woman to pursue a singing career,  

With few friends or activities, Grace takes off for Ibiza to inspect the home. The change in scene initially does not help. “The problem was me. There was no escape from grief and loneliness. So long as I stayed in the same ageing body with my same curdled memories, I was my own life sentence.” 

Suspecting foul play, Grace moves out of her comfort zone making inquiries of the woman’s friends. The book takes odd turns into fantasy and telepathy and mind control, and Grace increasingly discovers she enjoys new people and experiences, moving beyond old ruts and choices. She seeks understanding rather than love. “There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love.” 

Recalling the relationship with her husband, she finds she is less resistant to close relationships and appreciates someone by her side who can be “a shock absorber to the madness of experience.”   

In both books, the protagonists assume that their own experiences will guide others, and other characters ensure that the self-absorption does not go too far. Abrupt withdrawal from old regrets and everyday problems, along with the release of secrets, can offer survival mechanisms. 

Time play

Real Americans by Rachel Khong is a family saga – an odd mixture of fantasy, suspense and speculative fiction that toys with genre and sense of time. 

The novel has three distinct sections, with a woman, her son and mother serving as narrators, lending adding to the sense that time is fluid with no set beginning or end. The first section starts in 1999 with Lily, a Chinese American who struggles with money and resists the ambitious goals her mother has set for her. An unpaid intern at an online travel magazine in New York, Lily meets her supervisor’s nephew – a wealthy private equity asset manager. Raised by ambitious parents, both are lonely and lost. 

Mistakenly deeming such feelings as compatibility, the two marry. “If our bodies disappeared – if they vanished – and what remained was only our souls, I was certain they would share a resemblance. Both us had been formed like stones in a river, washed over by our parents’ expectations – the forceful currents of them. No wonder we were drawn to each other.” 

The connection is not sustainable. Lily, while young, was grateful her parents do not expect her to pursue Chinese language or culture, but questions emerge later. While pregnant, accompanying Matthew on a business trip to China, she visits the university her mother attended and meets Ping. He marvels how she cannot speak Chinese and how little she knows about her mother’s background, suggesting that she is a “real American.” He asks that she deliver a sealed note to her mother. Instead, Lily reads and discards the private communication.

Lily also learns that her parents and Matthew’s father were once colleagues who experimented on their own children in a quest to give humans better use of time. This explains why her son, Nick, appears more Caucasian than Chinese. The discovery prompts Lily to flee her mother’s control and Matthew’s stifling family wealth. 

The second section jumps to 2021 and Nick growing up the Pacific Northwest in humble circumstances. For fifteen years, Nick assumes his father abandoned the family and his mother is his only relative. Both mother and child have moments when time eerily is suspended, when a few moments can seem like weeks, allowing them to focus. The two have little control over the sense of timelessness. “Life always seemed too short, but now, alone, life seems far too long.” 

A precocious high school friend teaches Nick to drive and lets him use computer connected to a laptop. The two wonder why Nick looks nothing like his Chinese American mother. So the teens get jobs on an oyster farm, raising money for a DNA ancestry test and Nick soon reconnects with his wealthy father. He keeps the discovery to himself and “justified the lies upon lies by reasoning that she [Lily, his mother] had been the one to lie to me first.” 

Wealth transforms Nick’s life. A hefty donation allows him to join his friend in applying to top-tier schools and both head to Yale where different interests ensure that the friendship fades. Later, Nick has a luxurious place to stay in New York City for a summer job and a professional job waiting after graduation. Entitlement, followed by self-awareness and shame, contribute to distance with his father and estrangement with his mother.

The third and final section is the story of May, Lily's mother, who fled China and yearned to improve the human experience but loses her daughter in the process. In her eighties, she observes Nick, envying his youth and ability to start anew. “People once looked at me the way they look at him, with open and interested faces. It was that way for me, before.” 

Grandson and grandmother connect in San Francisco and May recalls her plans to flee the brutal restrictions of Mao’s China. May had two options – to leave with Ping, the man she loved by swimming away in the night, evading patrols, or accepting passage on smuggling boat with a graduate student who long admired her. Calculating the odds of success, May chooses the latter plan, setting off with a man she does not love for the United States. Ambition takes priority over love. “In America, my ambition, like a flame had only grown. I had hoped for more time in this country – this place with its abundant promises. Without time, ambition is worth nothing. It is only frustration. Time was what I wanted, more than anything.” 

May accidentally becomes pregnant and is not close with her daughter, Lily, other than imposing her own ambitions on the child. May is disturbed when eight-year-old Lily gives her a watch for Mother’s Day. “In Chinese, giving a clock is bad luck. It suggests the end. In giving a clock, you’re reminding someone of the reality, the eventuality, of their time running out. My daughter, the American girl – of course she didn’t know.” 

May’s expectations for Lily are high. Her constant reminders that the girl is gifted and superior cause the child's self-esteem to wither. With so much of her life behind her, so many relationships in ruins, the many “what ifs” trouble May. Repeatedly, May chose career over love. “No, it didn’t make much sense, that I despised and thought so highly of myself at the same time. How tangled it all was! The more I hated myself, the more I needed to prove my extraordinariness.” By doggedly seeking immortality, resenting any interruptions to her career, she ensured self-isolation. “Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions – that I had been wrong about life, entirely.” 

With old age, she reflects, the “future shrinks with each passing second.” She no longer minds time rushing onward and instead relishes the present, however limited. “All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention.”  

The three narrators learn that wealth does little to cure loneliness, and all reconnect at the end. The story is about parental expectations and feeble attempts to shape children. The title prompts many questions about who are the “real Americans” and how people can create meaningful lives or reject such endeavors, refusing to respect others, especially one's children, who might create meaning in other ways. Lily, Nick and May each display self-reliance even as curiosity and individuality reign. 

Redemption

 

Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke is set in the fall of 1863. Much of Louisiana is occupied by the Union Army. The Civil War rages, and bitterness runs high with rampant brutality and property destruction. Slaves still toil and plantation owners still practice cruelty, espousing lofty excuses. Increasing numbers of southerners realize the war’s end won’t deliver peace for the South.

The book is a masterpiece, focusing on a small area between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and a few months of the war while encompassing themes that resonate today. One observer of a battle, a schoolteacher abolitionist from Boston, observes: “I think we may be watching a prelude to our nation’s ultimate fate. Civilization follows the sun. We have scorched our way to the other end of the continent. No matter how much we took, no matter how many living things we killed, there was never enough.” 

Six characters of various backgrounds narrate, and each has reasons for tremendous resentment and distrust. All struggle regret and guilt, having colluded in murder, maiming and entrapment, at times targeting one another.  As one character observes that “the content of your dreams does not take orders, and a stone bruise on the soul can be forever.”

Two are women of color who have suffered horrific abuse. “I have just seen too many women hurt by men,” says Hannah Laveau, a woman searching for an infant son separated from her during a battle. “See they cain’t abide what they are; it’s not who they are, it’s what they are. They are full of hate when they come out of the womb. And if they’re not, it’s taught to them. The only thing valuable in their lives is the belief they are better than us.” 

The six characters eventually expose their vulnerabilities, pain and grief with one another. By the end, forgiveness is the only way forward. Suffering and thoughts of escape via suicide are set aside. “You can become part of the Milky Way just by looking at it," notes the abolitionist. "Do you want to throw that away?”

The misfits in southern society eventually wage battle against a common enemy, discovering that working together is far better than any righteous insistence on a pointless cause based on power and divisions. Rejecting and escaping the South’s rigid class system and ways is the only way to find peace and redemption.    

Of course, many other characters in the book, not to mention the world today, cannot overcome cultural differences and feelings of insecurity and superiority so easily. Burke foreshadows the conclusion by noting in the early pages: “Voltaire had no answer for mankind other than the suggestion that we tend our own gardens and let the lunatics go about their own way.” 

Devouring

 

Wolf at the Table, the family saga by Adam Rapp spans 1951 to 2010. A withdrawn, hardworking  veteran of World War II and a devout Catholic mother raise six children in their middle-class home in Elmira, NY. The mother is a tough taskmaster, compensating for the husband's PTSD. A portrait of Jesus overlooks the dining room table, but the mother is in command. Catholicism is a rote requirement, practiced with little reflection or care.

The novel skips through the years, the chapters loosely tied to key historical events and narrated by the various family members. Each adult child displays a steely resilience, an individuality honed by a desperate urge for privacy that comes from growing up in a large and intrusive family. 

Four of the children emerge from the home with strong personalities, secrets and unresolved issues. With the haphazard choice of years and the multiple narrators, Rapp gives his characters privacy, ensuring that readers achieve limited understanding of each character's motivations.  

Myra is a central character, a key narrator who manages to maintain family connections. The novel starts with her furtively reading her copy of The Catcher in the Rye at a diner near her home. She meets a young man that afternoon who drives her around in his car, abruptly displaying reticence when she mentions the size of the family. That evening a nearby family is slaughtered, but Myra does not mention the stranger or this prying questions. 

Myra eventually becomes a nurse, working at a state corrections facility while failing to care for herself. She marries and raises her son as a single mother after her husband develops schizophrenia and flees. Her angry brother Alec suffers sexual abuse as an altar boy from the parish priest that goes either unrecognized by the family, or perhaps unacknowledged. He also lies and steals, and the parents banish him from the family home.  The youngest sibling dies as an infant. Joan has developmental challenges and never leaves home. Fiona aspires to to be an actress while living a hedonistic and impoverished lifestyle in New York City. Lexy, the most ambitious, pursues an education and manages to escape the family’s unhappy choices. Her brief time as narrator role ends after she marries a man who can and does assist other family members through illness and other difficulties. The couple is generous, but also keeps a distance and sets boundaries. 

The story takes a disturbing turn in the pre-internet 1980s when Alec sends his mother a series of postcards from various towns with names, two-digit numbers along with an ominous message, “Saying hello and goodbye.” Years later, Myra finds the cards. The internet is widely available in 2000 yet she shows no curiosity, seeks no proof. Instead, she simply writes, expressing her suspicions: “If you are hurting these boys you need to stop yourself. I implore you to take a long, hard look at your life.” There is no call to the authorities – and the reader can only wonder how much blame the family, especially Myra, should shoulder for Alec’s many crimes. 

The children grow up, well practiced at masking true feelings from a disapproving mother, and as adults delude themselves about the problems at hand and the past's influence. The siblings are not close and occasional family get-togethers are similar to Catholic rituals, rote and meaningless. Mental illness is rampant and no character is truly at peace. There is more than one wolf at the table. 

Characters

Animals exhibit strong character and distinctive points of view for those who are most perceptive. Pets narrate two recent books, Buster by George Pelecanos and The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard. 

While the style of the first is contemporary and plain-spoken and the second is historical fantasy, each pet presents a delightful, poignant point of view. At times puzzled by the creatures who share their homes, Buster and Grimalkin pursue as much agency as possible in a world controlled by humans. Both tales serve as allegories about aging in changing societies, the history one life can span along with the treasure of memories for those who have loved and lost and the peace that accompanies reflection on past relationships. 

Buster, born in a two-bedroom apartment in in Washington DC, romps with his mother, multiple siblings and a human mother with her three children. Sweet and smart, he relishes time outdoors but money is tight. The puppies gradually disappear until it’s Buster’s turn, when a visiting exterminator offers to give him a home.

Life is uncertain for Buster and the troubled humans who provide shelter. The exterminator is controlling and angry, prompting his wife to leave with their son. The breakup leads to Buster being left tied outside for long periods, often without water. Eventually, a neighbor calls animal control. The officer is kind, but fearing life in a cage, Buster flees, scavenging the streets until he befriends a grieving widower.  

The widower gives Buster to his nephew, a marijuana dealer. Top lavishes Buster with a comfortable home, toys and attention. “Because he didn’t go out to a job, Top had time to spend with me, and we used it well. He walked me regularly and took me to places that I could run off my leash.” 

An arrest disrupts their carefree days. Anticipating a prison sentence, Top arranges for his uncle to care for Buster once again before tragedy ensues and Top vanishes from Buster’s life. 

Buster and the uncle grow old together, falling into a pattern until the man dies. Buster endures another period of scavenging until one day he follows a young girl home. Checking his tags, the family learns the dog’s owner has died. A neighbor warns that the animal was a “sweet and loyal companion to the deceased” and may not take to a new home. 

Buster adjusts and his last years are idyllic from the human reader’s point of view. Comfortable and loved, he contemplates death with stoicism. “All of us had to get gone to make room for the new.” Buster appreciates his good home, but cherishes memories of earlier days, remembering his favorite toy in his first apartment, the warmth of his mother along with what he regards as his best days, riding with Top in the Monte Carlo: “My collar with my name spelled out in diamonds, my head held up, strong and proud. When Top was my master, and I was king.” Buster, like many humans, prefers adventure and thrill over stability. 

The Ghost Cat begins in London,1902, with a yellow tabby's last day of his one real life. His favorite human is the charlady who rescued the abandoned, starving kitten and brought Grimalkin into her master’s home. Just before Grimalkin dies, he spies his reflection in a brass firebox. “A hunched tabby cat stared back at him, crooked of tail and jagged of whisker…. There was a majesty about him, as there was with all handsome cats grown old, and a robustness to his form…. He was a thinking cat and, as such, enjoyed a life of quiet intellectual contemplation.”

As far as Grimalkin is concerned, cats communicate as well as humans, “able to express everything he needed perfectly well in tail-flicks, purrs, chirrups and rubs; and any human worth their salt, like Eilidh, was able to understand this language.” 

A peaceful death by the fireplace releases him from the pain of aging. “The ache of his back eased; the arduous pull and heave of his lungs subsided, and as the rising flames beat their warmth upon his fur, the twist of his thoughts fell silent for the last time ever in this life.”

A mix-up surrounding Grimalkin’s death leads to a choice, either moving to oblivion or proceeding with the remainder of his eight lives as a ghost in the same London home. Any time Grimalkin falls asleep, a new life begins, and he witnesses snippets of history: a 1909 meeting with James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan; the generosity displayed during a 1935 meeting between a wealthy Rockefeller wife and the the wife of Alexander Fleming, who developed penicillin; the rush to a bomb shelter with a newborn in 1942; a stop at the charlady’s deathbed amid the coronation celebrations of 1953; the televised moon landing in 1969; the breakup of the home into small rooms and roommate cruelty in 1997; the 2008 financial crisis and playfulness with a computer; and a final return in 2022 with a family preparing the space for their first child. Also in the home is one Grimalkin’s  many descendants, a sweet gray tortoiseshell with an marmalade flank, “spoiled rotten by her humans.”  

Like Buster, Grimalkin contemplates death with a stoic peace. “There comes a time in a cat’s playful existence when a huge, soporific calm falls over them.” As he falls asleep for the last time, two thoughts much like Buster’s enter his head: the memory of his mother licking him as a newborn kitten and a smiling Elidh, his favorite human, looking down at him.    

Two well-crafted plots on aging ensure that any reader fortunate enough to share a home with a pet may not look at the creatures the same way again.