Life, death, and friendship

One Hundred Years 

of Lenni and Margot

by Marianne Cronin

/ Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ /

One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot is a book about life and death. It is about endless love and failed relationships. Most of all, it is about friendship.

We learn in the first few pages that Lenni is not expected to live and that Margot is in her twilight years. The ending of this book is not a surprise but it is surprising and beautiful. Prepare yourself for an ugly cry. I have not been this moved by a book in years.

Margot, at the age of eighty-three, finds herself in Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital, awaiting cardiac surgery. Lenni, age seventeen, is also in this hospital in the “May Ward,” which is reserved for patients with “life-limiting” conditions. Lenni prefers to think of it using the old word, terminal, as in airport terminal, from which she might fly away.

Lenni first sees Margot, wearing her purple pajamas and purple slippers, furtively rummaging in the May Ward’s recycling bin. Lenni distracts the hospital personnel so Margot could keep digging. In this moment of silent communication, an unbreakable bond of friendship is formed. We don’t learn what Margot was looking for until very late in the book, and it becomes clear why it is so important to her and why she was away from her designated ward.

As fate would have it, the hospital turns an old IT storeroom into The Rose Room, the patient art center. Lenni and Margot wind up in the “eighty and over” art class, even after the hospital balked at Lenni attending the class with seniors. While getting to know one another, Lenni realizes that 17 plus 83 is one hundred. She proposes that they make a painting for each year of their lives.

What follows is the gradual recounting of each of their life stories. We learn much about each of them, about loss, longing, and disappointment. We learn about marriage and divorce and long-lost love.

And we stayed there, watching the stars.

“I find it so peaceful,” Margot told me after a while.

“Me too.”

“Do you know,” she said slowly, “that the stars that we see the clearest are already dead?”

“Well, that’s depressing.” I took my hand from hers.

“No,” she said gently, linking her arm through mine, “it’s not depressing, it’s beautiful. They’ve been gone for who knows how long, but we can still see them. They live on.”

They live on.