Shadow Life: Living & Dying on Our Own Terms
Shadow Life, created by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu, demonstrates the challenges of aging and mortality with humor and magical realism. The story begins with the main character, Kumiko, sneaking away from an assisted living facility. Soon after she settles into a new apartment, the shadow of death begins to follow her. Kumiko isn’t going quietly though. She devises a plan to keep the shadow at bay so she can live out the rest of her life on her own terms.
Kumiko’s story is full of examples of how ageism can negatively impact our experiences in later life. However, Kumiko’s creativity and resilience reminds us that older people have the agency to fight back.
Aging in community
Once Kumiko settles herself into an apartment, she starts to rebuild her routine and her community. People know her at the gym, she’s friendly with her regular bus driver, and her neighbors offer support when they can. She’s living alone, but she isn’t isolated or lonely.
Studies have found that the vast majority of older people want to continue to live in their own home as long as possible. This used to be called “aging in place,” but has been renamed “aging in community” to reflect the importance of relationships with people and neighborhood resources.
Kumiko is able to successfully live on her own because she has placed herself in a neighborhood where she’s near what she needs and has a network of support. However, most cities are designed in a way, from public infrastructure to social opportunities, that makes aging in community difficult. The Age-Friendly Cities initiative is one attempt to correct this, but we will need significant public investment to undo decades of car-centric planning and age-segregated services.
Despite Kumiko’s demonstrated ability to take care of herself, her daughters won’t stop worrying and insisting she can’t be on her own safely. This creates friction in their relationship and prevents her daughters from being able to support their mom at all.
Role reversal
Early on in the book it becomes clear that Kumiko is hiding from her daughters. While well-meaning, her daughters’ fear for her safety encroaches too much on Kumiko’s ability to live her life the way she chooses.
Infantilization, or treating someone like they are a child in spite of their age and experience, is a common form of ageism in caregiving. In fact, it’s very common to see the term “role reversal” used to refer to adult children taking care of their parent. However, this framework is wrong and is harmful. Older adults are not children and they do not lose the role of being a parent, even when they need additional support from a caregiver.
It’s not only common for adult children or professional caregivers to infantilize older adults, but the medical system and other institutions can do this by limiting older people’s choices in the name of their own safety. This is because modern medicine and many aging services are designed to prolong life as much as possible without enough consideration for quality of life. In one of my favorite books on this subject, Being Mortal, the author Atul Gawande explains,
“Our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.”
While Kumiko faces health challenges and knows her time is limited, her priority is to live out the rest of her life doing the things she enjoys in the place she chooses to call home. As the shadow of death approaches, Kumiko chooses to shape her own story down to the last page.
The final chapter
The main conflict in Shadow Life is between Kumiko and the shadow of death. The shadow has begun to follow her, but Kumiko isn’t ready to die just yet. When the shadow tries to take her before she’s ready, she uses her vaccuum to fight it off, which works temporarily.
Kumiko’s fight with the shadow shows that she is capable of taking care of herself and that she is enjoying her life enough to want to keep living it.
Ageism makes us believe that older people are less capable. It’s not that we won’t experience changing abilities throughout our life, but with the right social and physical environment older people can adapt to those changes and continue to thrive. It’s our failure to build a world that recognizes this possibility that is the problem.
Ageism also makes us believe that older people’s lives must be boring, lonely, and not worth living. The author of Shadow Life, Hiromi Goto, wants to change this and explains that her books are an attempt to create more representations of older women as “interesting, powerful, and complex” with stories worth telling. This is a worthy goal and an important step towards dismantling the ageism that is so deeply ingrained in our popular culture.
Kumiko knows she will die eventually and has no interest in trying to live forever. However, she fights the shadow because her life is worth fighting for. She values herself and her experience the way we should value all older lives.
