ABSTRACT
In the British Museum is an installation entitled Cradle to Grave produced by ‘Pharmacopoeia’, a group comprising Susie Freeman, a textile artist; David Critchley, a video artist; and Dr. Liz Lee, a general practitioner. The work includes a fine, silver-grey net fabric, forty-two feet (thirteen meters) in length and one foot, eight inches (over half a meter) in width (Figure 7.1). Down each half-length are placed stories of men’s and women’s lives in captioned personal photographs, documents, and objects (Figure 7.2). Incorporated into the net are two lifetimes’ supplies of over fourteen thousand prescribed pills, lozenges, tablets, and capsules—“the estimated average number prescribed to every person in Britain during their lifetime. This number does not include over-the-counter remedies, vitamins or other self-prescription pills” (The British Museum 2014, n.p.). In September 2011, as I drifted up and down the installation’s length and mulled over the potential pages of this book, I knew Cradle to Grave could be an entry point to ask how are we to understand the passage from liveliness to enfeeblement and dying into death, especially among the oldest-old? How are we to reflect on the geographies, mobilities, and rhythms of life at its close? Here, then, I want to reflect on whether, how, and to what extent it is possible to flourish through this most challenging of prospects. Unexpectedly, my entry into this discussion has been via a route more circuitous than that characterizing other chapters; this is because, belatedly, I have been reminded that dying and death affect every stage of the life-course, and are the subjects of signifi-cant interdisciplinary scholarship (Davies and Park 2012), including among geographers. I have felt compelled to acknowledge all that in what follows.
