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.