Assisted Living or Assisted Suicide?

The adage “old age is not for sissies” was emblazoned, as I recall reading somewhere, on a needlepoint cushion in the possession of the actress Bette Davis. Certainly there existed no better poster girl for the depredations of chronology, both mental and physical, than Bette Davis in her later years. As part of a boomer cohort now gazing warily into the rheumy eye of codgerdom, I come increasingly to regard the subject of aging with bemusement and a kind of clammy fascination. So let us consider certain denizens of the Idyll Inn, a "retirement lodge” in a smallish urban centre and the focal point of Joan Barfoot’s new novel, Exit Lines. The Idyll Inn is “a two-storey Petri dish of adjustments among the lame, the halt, the partly deaf, the half-blind, the liver-damaged, ovary-missing, joint-stiffened, determined veterans of decades of breathing: quite a crew. Every sag and wrinkle in the place a medal for some kind of valour.” Specifically, our attention is directed...