Middle Age and Death

To understand the relationship between middle age and death, these concepts must be situated in their cultural and historical context. In the case of people in the United States who are currently middle age, their historical beginnings are located between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, in that demographic cohort whose ideas, assumptions, values, and styles defined the era that became known as the baby boomers. At each stage of their lives, the baby boomers redefined the character of that age-specific category, from childhood through youth, until their current position, middle age, poised on the verge of what was previously referred to as old age, but now cast in a more flattering light as seniors or golden-agers.

The social scientific literature on middle age and death is fragmented, made up of the literature on the definition of middle age and the literature on the specific character of their death experiences, such as the care of elderly parents in decline, a task that makes it difficult for baby boomers to sustain the fanciful belief that came out of the 1960s that they would never age and never die. The purpose of this entry is to explain the attitudes of middleaged people in the United States toward death, the particular character of their perceptions of death, and to point out the ways in which these attitudes and confrontations are grounded in their generation experience.

History of the Baby Boom Generation

That bulge in the population pyramid that represents the baby boomers, those who were born between 1946 and 1964, during a period of prosperity, were the major factors in explaining why the United States became youth centered. Their numbers and their spending power constituted a powerful force in the economic marketplace. They were listened to and courted as no previous generation of young people in the United States had been before. Their popular culture styles were imitated by both the younger and the older generations. They were led to believe that they were wiser and morally purer than their parents and grandparents, who, in a rapidly changing society, had nothing to teach them. One of their slogans, “Don't trust anyone over twenty-five,” became “Don't trust anyone over thirty,” and then disappeared. The new age category that Bennett Berger termed “almost endless adolescence” evolved in a youth-centered society into a middle age with an ever-expanding outer limit.

The cultural center of gravity during the 1960s became young people, with children at one end and middle-aged adults and the elderly at the other, tending to emulate youthful styles. As the baby boomers aged, they carried the importance of their style along with them. So, for example, jeans came to be worn by all age groups, and casual dress for one day a week even spread into corporate settings.

The baby boomers are beginning to reach retirement and are on the verge of old age. This is occurring during a period during which the United States has shifted to a less obvious death-denying society but one that is nonetheless obsessed with aging and its inevitable outcome, death. The images of old age are changing from white-haired men and women sitting in rockers smoking pipes or knitting to physically fit and smiling latemiddle-agers on water skis or tennis courts. Euphemisms such as “seniors” are invented, and cosmetic surgery is used to mask the advancing years. The solution baby boomers have found for the depredations of old age is to never grow old.

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