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seven - A great age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2022

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Summary

While I was drafting this chapter, The Guardian published an interview with Deborah Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (Moss, 2010). When asked about the postnatal deaths of her three children she commented:

When you are very old, you accept what has happened. You cry over some things, but not a lot. It's too distant. It's as if part of you gets nearer to it yourself, and then you think the churchyard here is very handy …

It is not often that people describe themselves as ‘very old’, but when they do it is often, as here, in the course of claiming some kind of temporal distance along with acknowledging the proximity of the end.

The ebb and flow of debate over the definition of old age and the homogenising effect of any such categorisation have generated periodic interest in the idea that there is a category beyond ‘ordinary’ old age. This is rather different to proposals to divide the category of old people into ‘the young old’ and ‘the old old’ and, similarly, different to the more radical re-categorisation of the stages of life that launched the concept of the third age. To quote Mike Hepworth (2003, p 93):

If we live long enough there comes a time when we really are ‘in’ old age and there's no escape and biological embodiment claims us at the last.

What does he mean by the idea of ‘really being in old age’? In analysing documents for my 1982 study of the uses of the concept of old age, my attention was caught by some of the ways in which the word ‘very’ was used, and how being ‘very old’ was linked to ‘frailty’. For example, the Secretaries of State, in their Foreword to the White Paper Growing Older (Department of Health and Social Security, 1981), claimed that they had in mind the needs of ‘the growing numbers of elderly people – particularly the very old and frail’. Later the White Paper referred to the same group when expressing concern over the quality of life of ‘elderly people, especially the very old and frail’ (para 1.5).

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Chapter
Information
Unmasking Age
The Significance of Age for Social Research
, pp. 137 - 162
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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  • A great age
  • Bill Bytheway
  • Book: Unmasking Age
  • Online publication: 07 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781847426192.007
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  • A great age
  • Bill Bytheway
  • Book: Unmasking Age
  • Online publication: 07 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781847426192.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • A great age
  • Bill Bytheway
  • Book: Unmasking Age
  • Online publication: 07 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.46692/9781847426192.007
Available formats
×