Six: Dying and bereavement in old age

Publication Date:
23 Oct 2007
Pages:
119–144
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51952/9781447342540.ch006
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At first sight, dying in old age presents the most timely and natural of all deaths and the accompanying bereavement the most anticipated and uncomplicated grief. Perhaps for this reason, there has historically been a notable neglect of the topic. Research into ageing, despite its mushrooming in the latter part of the twentieth century, largely ignored the subject of death until it became apparent that the health and social care of older people might merge seamlessly into end- of-life care. The seminal work on dying and grief which we looked at earlier was either based on younger populations, such as younger cancer sufferers or those bereaved through public disaster, or the inclusion of large numbers of older people, such as older widows, was coincidental and the lens of old age did not provide an explicit angle in the theorising. The counselling textbooks continue to pay little attention to the dimension of old age, although, by comparison, new resources for working with children and young people in grief appear all the time. Yet for most of us in the advanced societies of late modernity, our first and only encounters with death will occur in conjunction with old age, as we experience the deaths of grandparents, aged parents, partners, siblings and friends who have reached old age, to finally face our own death. The majority of people in the Anglo-Saxon and North American worlds currently die aged 75 or above and the proportions dying at over 85 years are set to rise. Death is in one sense ever-present for those working with older people, yet at the same time invisible in older people’s services.

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