Abstract
This chapter advances the view that life can be understood as the implicit composition and recomposition of an autobiography, and that ageing can be seen as an ever-changing narrative perspective on the whole of life. Among the topics discussed are narrative in general, life story, autobiographical reflection and narrative identity.
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Notes
- 1.
Margaret Urban Walker has edited an entire volume (1999) on the particular problems for women ageing. In her Introduction, she writes:
If we are tempted to think that gender matters less as women age, this might well be the dubious product of a cultural prejudice itself rooted in some of our society’s gender norms: that since ‘womanliness’ and ‘femininity’ matter only in relatively young (that is, heterosexually ‘desirable’ and reproductively capable) women, we can stop taking gender seriously as women age. […] But gender […] encompasses the whole set of symbolic representations, material conditions, and social practices that define sexual divisions of labor, opportunity, recognition, responsibility and reward. (p. 3)
- 2.
The Germans have an evocative word for it that is mentioned by some gerontologists: Torschlusspanik – the panic at the thought of the gate closing before one is through it.
- 3.
See Christopher Hamilton’s chapter on the ageing body, for example.
- 4.
According to the novelist Julian Barnes (2008 p. 23) the term was coined by the French critic Charles de Bos. Barnes asks:
How best to translate it? ‘The wake-up call to mortality’ sounds a bit like a hotel service. […] but it is like being in an unfamiliar hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting, and at some ungodly hour you are suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world.
- 5.
There is an interesting contrast with Ivan Illyich. Illyich comes to realise that he has wasted his life on unimportant things such as career progression and social posturing, at the expense of his family. Now diagnosed with a mysterious terminal disease, he descends into irremediable regret and self-pity. However, Illyich derives some solace from the mere fact that what was revealed to him was the truth, and he has time to experience a kind of quasi-religious epiphany before he dies. It is worth remembering the role of luck in the story: he might well have died before the epiphany, still racked by regret and self-pity.
- 6.
Agich (2003) usefully examines the concept of dependence. He challenges the thought the old age involves increasing dependence. Instead, it should be seen as a change in the type of dependence, for we are all dependent on different things throughout our lives.
- 7.
As far as I know, the phrase was coined by Robert Butler (1963). A striking dramatic version of the life review process is Beckett’s (1958) one-man play Krapp’s Last Tape.
- 8.
Sometimes the present response to a deep life review might be one of guilt – indeed, justified guilt – for serious past wrongdoing. There is then a question of whether a therapist with a knowledge of the past facts would encourage the feeling of justified guilt, either for psychological cathartic purposes, or simply as the morally appropriate recognition of the wrong and of the victim’s suffering.
- 9.
From Maugham’s last book of essays, Points of View (1959), cited in Butler (1963, p. 220).
- 10.
‘Integrity’ is Erik Eriksson’s (1986) term. He saw the drive towards integrity as directed against a pervasive and understandable temptation towards despair. Integrity wins out if the ‘final strength’ of later life – wisdom – is to result. However, this does not mean despair is thereby overcome. Quite the opposite: wisdom needs the continuing threat of despair in order to prevent it turning into detached naiveté or worse, presumptuousness. This idea seems akin to the idea that true religious faith is only possible in the lingering presence of doubt, for otherwise it would descend into fanaticism.
- 11.
Ruddick (1999 p. 53) also stresses the importance of relationships within which a healthy curiosity is to be sustained: ‘an individual is able to enjoy, remain curious, manage pain, or reflect on death only if she can create the occasions, with others, for doing so’.
- 12.
The corollary is that the contemporaneous judgement about significance may be more accurate because of emotional proximity, but may also be more vulnerable to emotional distortion. Sometimes it is not clear what a feeling is until one can look back on it, as when one says: ‘I thought I was in love, but now I see it was only infatuation.’ On the other hand, it might be present bitterness that makes me reinterpret a past love in this way. On the problems of interpreting past emotions, see also Goldie (2003).
- 13.
I say ‘almost’ because there are certain properties of my future wife that could not be entirely a matter of chance: the fact that she was female, of a certain age, of a certain attractiveness, etc. and I was heterosexual, of a certain age, sufficiently attractive to her, etc.
- 14.
In Cowley (2010), I introduce the notion of ‘retrospective QALYs’. A normal QALY is a quality-adjusted life-year and is used as a rough tool to justify the allocation of scarce healthcare resources to treating one patient with a particular condition, over treating another with a different condition. One notorious problem with QALYs is that geriatric, palliative and hospice care are hard to justify because the care cannot be expected to generate many more life-years. However, I argued that such care can be justified by providing the patients with more time and comfort for life review, and that this will ‘add’ many re-examined past life-years to their present experience.
- 15.
For an ongoing attempt to define wisdom and give advice on how to achieve it, see the Templeton-funded Wisdom Research Project at the University of Chicago: http://wisdomresearch.org
- 16.
The example is discussed by Harriott (2003). Cf. Simone de Beauvoir (in the extract in McKee 1982, p. 274),
The notion of experience is sound when it refers to an active apprenticeship. Some arts and callings are so difficult that a whole lifetime is needed to master them. […] In many fields, such as philosophy, ideology and politics, the elderly man [sic] is capable of a synthetic vision forbidden to the young. […] One must have lived a long time to have a true idea of the human condition.
- 17.
This is discussed in Chap. 11 of this Handbook.
- 18.
In 1998, Dutch citizen Edward Brongersma successfully requested assistance to end his life on the grounds that he was ‘tired of life’. The vast majority of assisted suicides under the Dutch euthanasia laws concern competent adult patients in the final stages of a terminal disease, and these are not controversial. The Brongersma case, and a small number of similar cases since then, remains controversial. For discussion, see Huxtable and Moller (2007).
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Cowley, C. (2016). Coming to Terms with Old Age – and Death. In: Scarre, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39356-2_12
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