It's sometimes easy to think of life in an "assisted living" facility as being almost as depressing as a nursing home and to think of nursing home life as more depressing than death.

Dudley Clendinen takes a contrary point of view in "A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America" (Viking: $24.95). Canterbury Tower is an old age apartment/nursing home facility in Tampa, Fla., where Clendinen's father, Jobie, was editor of the Tampa Tribune for many years.

After Jobie's death and, after her health began to decline, Mrs. Clendinen moved to Canterbury Tower and her son spent a great deal of time with her until her death in 2007. The book is a tale of his mother and her companions at Canterbury.

"I never once saw Mother weep," he writes. "I'm sure she did, but not in front of us. She never whined, never complained of feeling lonely. Never prattled on to us, to her friends, or to strangers about how darling and wonderful my father had been, and what a difference he had made. She filed all that away somewhere inside. She was strong. He was well known. And she knew better than to be a bore."

The story at Canterbury really begins in 1998, three years after "Mother" had moved to Canterbury. She was 83 and suffered a stroke. To the surprise of everyone, most especially her physicians, she recovered, sort of.

"Mother kept on living and, in a couple of weeks, went back to Canterbury. So I did, too, and began to experience more of the life she lived. But there was a change. We didn't know at first that she would never return to her apartment. Her emergence from the coma had been so spectacular that we thought she might get well. For almost a week, in the quiet of her hospital room after she awoke, we had the most unusual conversations. . . . Then, she had another stroke and lost most of her ability to care for herself."

She was, nevertheless, a presence at the nursing home and remained a presence in the apartment wing.

The book, however, deals more with her friends and neighbors at Canterbury than it does about mother. It is about Mary, a Southern belle of the first order, of Karl, a rabbi who escaped the Nazis, of Wilber, who suffered from dementia long before he was transferred to the nursing wing, and of the "Emyfish," who pretty much ran the place.

As we read, we learn to admire and respect these men and women who were used to being in pretty much complete control of their lives and who adjust to semi-dependence and, later, complete dependence, with amazing grace and dignity.

"Death is not really the main preoccupation of life at Canterbury," he writes. "Life is, and Doris sometimes found herself wondering what many of the residents — the women especially — wondered, which is where and how they might try one more time for companionship or love. She paused, fingering her necklace. 'What I need is a nice little old man to live in the other bedroom and take care of things,' she sighed, looking around the apartment."

Later, when his mother was in a particularly tortured state, Clendinen made the decision to withdraw her medications, an act which enraged the nurses, and which was supposed to lead to her death and which, inexplicably, had no affect on her at all, except that her medical condition improved.

She went back to living and her son went back to socializing with her neighbors.

On Sept. 11, 2001, "the residents of Canterbury Tower learned of the attacks in the same way the rest of the world did, by watching television. Most of them, of course, were deep into their own eighth or ninth or tenth decades of history. They had moved to Canterbury with the feeling that all the major crises of their lives — with the possible exception of the ones involving their health — were now behind them. They could relax and be comfortable, secure within a system that permitted no surprises. They learned that morning, still in their pajamas, in their slippers and robes and housecoats — or already dressed, gripping the arms of their chairs, staring at the flickering horror on the television screens before them — that they were wrong."

They were wrong, Clendinen suggests because the real message of Canterbury is that life continues, no matter what the external circumstances. It is both a troubling and comforting concept.