ABSTRACT
We now move deeper into the experience of ageing, to what is increasingly referred to as the ‘fourth age’, when issues of disability and frailty come to predominate the lives of older people. This is ‘old age’ proper, the time of life when people finally do ascribe the adjective ‘old’ to themselves. It is what many have been waiting for all along, expecting it with varying degrees of apprehension (see Chapter 5). As he incurred his first stroke, the Anglo-American novelist Henry James said that in the very act of falling ‘he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying, “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing”’ (Edel, 1985: 706). Thus opened for him the last stage of life, one of which to be fearful but also in some sense to be respected.
