Death in Old Age: How a Pandemic Makes Us Rethink Mortality

The book examines the issue of old age in death in contemporary Western societies in the pre-Covid-19 period and during the recent pandemic. It aims to prompt rethinking of societal obligations to the aged and to reflect on ways of handling death in old age. By exposing which values and orientations towards death in old age have been reinforced and which have been challenged by the coronavirus pandemic, the book offers a platform to debate society’s responsibility to old people and to reflect on the legacy of the pandemic for the quality of the end of life care. It raises ethical and philosophical implications of the normalization the idea that during health crises some lives need to be prioritised over others. The book, by drawing from an extensive literature, from sociology, psychology, philosophy gerontology to death studies, throws light on the cultural values by which we understand mortality. Whilst the book’s focus is on the UK, its argument, that the marginalization of death in old age impacts on the quality of the end of life care, has enormous implications for other cultures in terms of how old age tends to be ignored and how they were neglected during the pandemic.

Barbara A. Misztal is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at University of Leicester, where she has taught from 2002. After finishing her MA in Sociology at University of Warsaw, and PhD in Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, her first teaching experience was at University of California, Riverside, where she also spent her postdoctoral year. After that she worked at Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Warsaw, and between 1990 and 2002 at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. She is interested in sociological theory, with the main focus being on problems of trust, informality, dignity, forgiveness, vulnerability, normality and memory. Her recent research focus on the significance of literary sources in older people’s search for narratives that make sense of life. She is the author of several books, including Later life: Exploring the Experience of Ageing Through Literature (2020), Multiple Normalities: making sense of ways of living (2015), The Challenges of Vulnerability (2011), Intellectuals and the Public Good. Creativity and Courage (2007), Theories of Social Remembering (2003), Informality: Social Theory and Contemporary Practice (2000), Trust in Modern Societies (1996), Action on AIDS. National Policies in Comparative Perspective (edited with D. Moss, 1990).