This is a beautiful and moving book. So relatable in its grappling with the death of and grief over an elderly loved one due to Covid, and the complete disorientation that came with such deaths.

In the first chapter, Schiller says:

“Because when you think of old people dying, you do not picture them dying by accident, in pain, screaming. *Age* looses them from that vision of death. Old age excuses us from understanding potential pain; regardless of the listed cause of death, old age is both their fundamental killer and their salvation. In our imaginations, anyway, the old generally do not die in agony; oldness supposedly allows a person to slip off the last few things that were keeping them here and greet death as an expected guest. I still can’t totally convey how *wrong* these visions are, at least in the case of my grandmother. She was not, I wanted to say, the ‘type’ of old person to be close to death already, any more than the rest of us are.”

Yes, yes, yes to this, especially as it echoes my own experience with my parents, who were in their mid/late eighties when they got Covid.

In a later chapter, Schiller adds:

“In the gap between my grandmother’s death by Covid and ‘normal’ death, I became unsure of how to think of what had happened. I could not tell if her death had been natural or unnatural. This was the murky question I was preoccupied by. If I could answer that question, I felt, I could figure out how to grieve, or maybe more precisely, how to file away this piece of personal history. It would become sharper, and I would know what objective heading to use. ‘I didn’t know how to hold a grief so vast,’ writes Meg Bernhard, of her own grandfather’s Covid death, and the way it sat inside of a much larger landscape of loss.”

Covid did not immediately kill my parents, but it set into motion steep, steady declines, all traceable to the virus. As Schiller’s experience did, mine led me into the labyrinth of American care for the aging — assisted living, memory care, nursing homes, hospitals. It was a baffling construct to navigate, one that often left me (and my parents) in tears.

This book felt personal to me, and sometimes gut-wrenching, but I don’t think one has to have experienced the broken system in the U.S. to appreciate the narrative or benefit from this book. AGING OUT is a beautifully written, compassionate, wise look at a country, a situation, and a group of people (which I guess I now belong to, at age 66…?) that none of us seem to have figured out.