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How can we navigate the challenges, catastrophes, and losses of later life?
What kind of relationship do we have with our ageing selves and with people close to us as they get older?
What is needed to support people psychologically as they journey through later life, and in particular when they start to lose the functioning of their minds?
And how can we help people to die well?
These are important questions in a world where an increasing number of people live well into their nineties—very different to how it was a century ago. According to official statistics, in the last forty years the number of people in the UK over sixty-five has increased by over three-and-a-half million (a fifty-two percent increase) and they currently make up eighteen percent of the population. In the next forty years it is predicted that the fastest growing segment of the population, those aged eighty and over, is set to more than double to over six million (Centre for Ageing Better, 2024). Some older people are blessed with good health and live active, fulfilling lives. Others struggle with health conditions that rob them of their independence, their dignity, and their sense of self. This is particularly true of dementia. At the moment one in five people over eighty live with dementia and, with a significantly ageing population, that number is set to rise exponentially. My mother was one of these statistics and also nearly blind and physically very frail by the time she died at ninety-two. Because of witnessing her fading away and, before that, the final years of my in-laws and my father, all with different but distressing and demeaning conditions, I felt drawn to reading The Hardest Passage and Life and Death.