Marc Sapir - El Doctor Marcos

I'll Fly Away

Stories about Amazing Disabled Elders

We all hope to grow old with dignity and some joyfulness. The intimate narratives of 40 extraordinary elders shared in I’ll Fly Away explore both the challenges of aging and the joys and vibrancy that often persist in the twilight years. Poignant observations of the patients, families, and a team of medical and public health professionals and para-professionals that intersect daily at the Center for Elders’ Independence in Oakland, California, reveal the complexities of aging, identity, amid the assertive persistence of the human spirit.

From a couple’s summer drive across the Arizona desert to a family’s struggle with mental illness to patients’ romantic escapades, each tale offers a unique glimpse into the resilience of individuals facing profound transitions and prompts questions about our collective responsibility to our elders.

Though this book is valuable for medical and public health professionals seeking how to best serve their communities and patients, it especially offers families kinship, support, and inspiration for navigating their own situations. For patients and readers in general, I’ll Fly Away champions the idea that every one of us is a unique person with needs, wants, and a voice that is discoverable and deserves to be heard.

Full of sometimes unimaginably amusing and amazing tales and endorsed by esteemed colleagues, I’ll Fly Away is a memoir and a powerful critique of societal attitudes towards aging. It embodies the notion that every life is a story worth telling, and every voice matters.

Read a sample chapter - ‘Initiation: The Rites of Spring’

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Deja Vu with Quixotic Delusions of Grandeur

A Memoir

“On a balmy October afternoon in 1971 I found myself on my back on a street in South San Francisco, my left shoulder blade pinned to the curb. I had tripped....(and) there was a lanky young man with an unsettling ferocity in his eyes standing over me, pointing a handgun at my face...”

Though this typical public-schooled suburban American kid becomes a doctor with the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers movement, the opening lines of Marc Sapir’s memoir reveal a life of disorderly chaos. From a radical disruptive anti-war medical student at Stanford, Sapir became a Public Health official, then accidentally first medical director of an all-inclusive team-based health program for disabled elders, caring for, writing and editing books about (and by) those elders. He coordinated development of Berkeley’s high school health center and later operationalized a methodology in public opinion polling that explains systematic deception in opinion research. Labeling himself a failed communist, the grandfather of 6 and playwright battles for working class egalitarian ideals while wandering around like a dement. Sapir inserts commentaries on social de-evolution, language, literature and cosmology, distilled through living during the holocaust and exposure to Oliver Sacks’ oeuvre and support. Youngster Marc dreamed of composing music and writing but, being a “good Jewish kid”, he caved to parental pressure and became “my son the doctor,”...in the beginning.

The Last Tale of Mendel Abbe

Sonny Bush and the Wise Men of New Chelm

The Last Tale of Mendel Abbe is an aging manic depressive story teller deeply affected by events in the world. On September 15, 2001, perchance, Mendel is napping alongside his wife as they drive home on the New Jersey Turnpike after a visit to old friends northwest of Philadelphia. Somehow, implausibly, the events of four days previous have escaped their attention.

Awakening near Newark, Mendel is incredulous to see the absence in the New York skyline, the clouds of smoke billowing from where the twin towers once stood. His shock becomes more traumatizing when he experiences TV and the government turning the tragic events into a circus of bizarre and misplaced chauvinist rhetoric about the heroism and victimization of the United States in modern history.

Driven by angst, and his own nature, Mendel embarks upon a tale taller than the towers to recuperate the sad state of history. For his project he chooses to resurrect a group of foppishly naïve characters from a little known Jewish shtetl in 19th century Poland, people invented by an earlier New Yorker, Solomon Simon, for the amusement of Jewish children. The name of the place: Chelm; of the people: the Wise Men. And they are coming to the U.S. to help Sonny Bush fix everything. You’ll see.