ABSTRACT
The editor and writer Diana Athill has become the great contemporary chronicler of the regrets, compensations and pleasures of old age. In her 2002 book Yesterday Morning, published when she was 85, she writes:
The older a person gets, the less he or she needs a doctor to define the prognosis. Unlike most young people, most older people are quite accepting of the finitude of their lives and they have an increasingly clear experiential understanding of the multiple processes by which the body, cumulatively, lets them down, becoming an ever-increasing liability so that eventually they will be content to shuffle it off. Dylan Thomas acknowledged that ‘wise men at their end know dark is right’2 while perversely urging his father to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’. He illustrates how different the perspective of relatives, like Geoff’s daughter Mary in our stories, can be from that of an old person like Geoff who knows he is dying or has nothing more to live for. Too often, relatives and perhaps especially grown children, attempt to show their love by insisting that the dying and their doctors struggle on.
