Aging, the Elderly, and Death

With the longevity revolution, for the first time in history, death has become a province of the old. During the 20th century, life expectancy increased by two thirds in the developed world. Increasingly its members die upon the conclusion of full, completed lives; in the United States, nearly 8 in 10 deaths occur among those 65 and older. Although this would seem to be the cause for collective celebration, instead old age has become a social problem. Cultural thanatophobia, excessive fear of death, has become thoroughly interwoven with cultural gerontophobia, fear of growing old or fear of the elderly, the latter demonstrated by the multibillion-dollar cosmetic surgery industry to obscure the aging process.

The cultural consequences of this great demographic change are considerable. Sociologist Wilbert E. Moore observed how the increasing longevity of all classes in postindustrial societies has disrupted the centuries-old synchronization between the temporal order of social systems and the temporal order of biological humans. Our contemporary social problem orientation to old age and anxieties about death may exist, in part, because we now outlive the traditional lifespan “recipes” and no longer “know” how to grow old and die. Whereas the traditional liminal state between life and death occurred soon after death, it now precedes mortality; one can now be simultaneously alive biologically and yet be socially dead.

With the old replacing the young as the most death-prone age group, the elderly have become the cultural shock absorbers of death, society's “death lepers” as Arlie Hochschild called them in The Unexpected Community. Death was a province of the young in Puritan New England, where parents often sent their children away to the home of relatives or friends ostensibly as a method of discipline but perhaps in actuality as a way to prevent them from becoming too emotionally attached to their offspring. Analogously, similar distancing from the death-prone is evidenced when the old move to agesegregated communities and when families send their aging family members to nursing homes to be cared for by others. This logic is evident in one of the central social gerontology paradigms of the last third of the 20th century, disengagement theory, which portrays a mutual parting of the ways between society and its older population. From the perspective of those aware of their limited life and with diminished ego strength, social withdrawal accompanies self-preoccupations and weakening emotional investments in others. From the perspective of society, the deaths of the disengaged diminish the disruptiveness of their deaths. It has been argued that the retirement phase of the life cycle arose, in part, as a cultural death consolation.

The longevity revolution has also affected the logistics for security that older persons traditionally had to command the loyalty and services of family members during their enfeebled years: inheritance. With land decreasingly being the chief legacy asset of individuals and with the increasing number of years spent in retirement and the dramatic post-1960s inflation of goods and services, particularly in medical care, the majority of older Americans now outlive their savings.

Further, given the age-stratified nature of so many social roles in modern societies, where individuals are more likely to interact and befriend their age mates throughout the life cycle, the longevity revolution has also made the final life stage a period of continuous bereavement as one's peers [Page 26]die off and funerals comprise a growing part of individuals' social life.

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