I’ll Fly Away: Stories about Amazing Disabled Elders

I’ll Fly Away: Sketches from the Center for Elders’ Independence is a profoundly human collection of essays that chronicles the lives and deaths of disabled elders within the PACE (Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly) model of care. Drawing on nearly a decade of experience as the first medical director at the Center for Elders’ Independence (CEI) in Oakland, California, Author Marc Sapir delivers a memoir that is both intensely personal and universally resonant. At its heart, this book is a celebration of aging, identity, dignity, and community, woven through stories that are as instructive as they are moving.

Rather than offering a clinical account of eldercare, Sapir allows the reader to sit beside him in moments of genuine connection, often messy, painful, and beautiful. In the story of Ara Belle Kingsby, we see the quiet power of a woman who confronts terminal cancer with unshakeable spiritual conviction. She refuses aggressive treatment, opting instead for palliative care, and teaches Sapir the limits and strengths of medical intervention. “She challenged my self-defined role as physician,” he writes, capturing the vulnerability that practitioners must sometimes accept when met with a patient’s unwavering will. The story is not simply about death; it’s about faith, control, and the invisible threads of family that bind us even as we let go.

Themes of autonomy and dignity permeate the book. Time and again, Sapir confronts the tension between medical knowledge and personal choice. “I believed, without good evidence, that working with dementia patients would be burdensome, tedious, and boring,” he admits early in the book. That assumption is thoroughly dismantled as he builds relationships with elders who, despite cognitive decline, offer insight and humanity. The story of his transformation from a reluctant participant to an advocate for collaborative, compassionate care is a subtle yet powerful arc.

Sapir writes not only as a physician but as a witness and participant in a richly complex community. He intersperses the personal with the professional, blending narrative memoir, clinical insight, and philosophical reflection. Readers will appreciate his honesty, including the admission of past mistakes, such as failing to communicate advance directive decisions to family caregivers, and the lessons those errors yield.

What elevates the book is Sapir’s insistence that storytelling itself is care. Through vivid portraits, he restores identity to elders often reduced to diagnoses. The narrative doesn’t shy away from contradictions, hope and despair, autonomy and dependency, comedy and sorrow all live side by side. As Sapir says in the introduction, the book is a story of “bipoles,” of life and death, inseparably bound together.”

In a society that often marginalizes the elderly, I’ll Fly Away is an essential read. It does not offer easy answers but rather opens space for the kind of difficult, necessary conversations about how we age and how we die. And perhaps more importantly, how we live in the space between.