Lessons on Aging and Dying

A Poetic Autoethnography

Ronald J. Pelias

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367621896
• eBook ISBN: 9781000259421
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Lessons in Aging and Dying: A Poetic Autoethnography captures the experience of being elderly and facing the end of life. The book presents a collection of poems about life's end accompanied with narrative commentary. Organized as 73 lessons, they can be read as personal curiosities, momentary realizations, farcical departures, embarrassing fears, therapeutic encounters, experiential truths, hopeful conjectures, and inevitable destinations.

This book is a poetic inquiry that calls upon the lyrical in narrative and poetic forms to enter its subject. It also is an autoethnography that examines culture through the deployment of the self. Framed by introductory and concluding remarks, the book is organized around three developmental stages. The initial pages, "Beginnings," recognize the author's birth into the end, a time when he knew he had arrived at a place beyond middle age. The middle unit, "From Here to There," displays an unsettled settling in, driven by an ongoing tension between resistance and acquiescence. It serves as a transitional stage into "Endings," the final section that anticipates death's imminent arrival and speculates about how author might meet his end. Together, these units provide opportunities for identification, speculation, and resistance.

Published as part of the prestigious autoethnographic series Writing Lives: Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Narratives, and written by one of the foremost academics in the fields of communication and performance studies, this text is particularly suitable for students and researchers in subjects such as relational and family communication, gerontology and end-of-life care, and performance studies.

Unit 1

BEGINNINGS

To begin at the beginnings of the end seems like a reach into fading light. Perhaps it’s just a last glance at what once was before the coming of a dark future. Perhaps it’s a desperate attempt to hang on, to stay in the present to record what’s here, to give myself a reason for carrying on. Perhaps it’s pure silliness told from an addled brain in the presumptuous belief that someone might want to listen. Regardless, to begin at the beginnings of the end is a gesture toward hope. It seeks a secure footing in hope’s domain, even as the light fades. Hope is located in the reach, in the open questions that wait for answers: How should I negotiate what I’m sure I will face? How should I feel and how should I behave? How should I proceed? And so I begin to chart the end without confidence that I will write what satisfies or garners trust. But I push on, hoping, attracted to the light like a moth. I am a phototactic creature trying to navigate my way.

LESSON 1

A beginning place carrying a history that years have earned, a history that still holds on to the promise of a future, to the possibility of getting it right. It’s a history that understands failure, finds in its frequent appearance a motivation for being.

The Beginning

In this third becoming, I begin

old age born dry as a fallen leaf,

fluttering in time’s torrid winds.

I want the full moon’s sanguine light.

I start with patches on my sleeves

stitched with the wrong thread,

torn, needing the needle’s work.

I want what I wear to look right.

LESSON 2

Writing is a strategy for learning what you believe. It provides you with sense-making narratives that turn the elusive into the concrete, which then become available for your consideration and potential action. In the struggle to find something that you can hold with confidence, alternative narratives, even counter-narratives, haunt, creating tensions that pull in different directions, particularly when discordant narratives have gained your trust. I reach for words for my daily survival, and I trust in such an effort to give me a place to reside, a temporary home whose walls could easily collapse, easily become just another casualty in the flood of doubt. Yet, I keep reaching. I write, believing in that moment what I’ve written. Found words may seem deeply durable or frighteningly flimsy.

Count Your Blessings

1.
Write happy poems, celebrating

how you’ve made it this far,

how your health has held up,

how each day is a true gift,

a cornucopia of possibilities.

After all, who wants to hear

all that moaning and groaning,

all those poor me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Beginning in the End
• UNIT 1: BEGINNINGS
• UNIT 2: FROM HERE TO THERE
• UNIT 3 ENDINGS
• Ending in the Beginning
• References