The fantasied timelessness of unconscious experience collides head-on with the inevitable timedness of mortal existence. This is most palpable when working analytically with elderly patients and may help explain our need to avoid such individuals by labeling them as “inappropriate for analytic treatment.” Our cherished linear developmental models have often reified our biases into fact and permitted our own fears to remain inaccessibly active. When we analysts attempt to segregate elderly patients by denying them their analyzability, we succeed only in maintaining developmentally approved “them-not us” fantasies. This paper explores motivations for such fantasies, as well as the price paid by elderly would-be analysands, avoidant analysts, and psychoanalysis. Clinical vignettes are presented to assist in the deconstruction of such obstacles and their collusion with our reluctance to access experience and meaning at the end of the life cycle.