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Life suddenly does not make sense to Joni—wife, mother, grandmother, daughter, nurse. Generational gaps are widening, professional practices are viewed differently, family seems distant and out of touch with what she is experiencing, and God appears to be of no help. Amid this turmoil, she feels the need to act and thus develops a plan which includes feigning senility in her seventies for the purpose of landing herself in an assisted living facility. There, in a place called Borealis in northern Minnesota, Joni plans to collect data on what it feels like to be old, institutionalized, and experiencing mental deficits, hoping those insights would write this book. Painfully, she decides that even her family and friends will need to be deceived.
At Borealis, Joni meets a host of colorful characters including a precious gems dealer turned philanthropist, an ex-nun who married a Jew, and a woman who stages her own death to heal her divided family. And then there is Sam, a man tormented by dysfunctional grief—unexpressed and unresolved secondary to guilt.
Joni's project ends up teaching her more than she set out to learn, as professional journey turns personal when she learns about the nurse she should have been and the old person she wants to become. And a brewing spiritual conflict is brought to a full boil when the life of her second love is threatened much like her first.
Ambivalence throughout this story is apparent as Joni tugs war between light-hearted and heavy-hearted postures toward both the developmental stage of older adulthood and her own aging process. She exposes what many old can relate to about the many aspects of society to which they can no longer relate. Then she takes a stab at why.
And in the end, all is not as it seemed.
