ABSTRACT
Illness, especially chronic illness or severe disability, reveals much about how a culture conceives life in time, being as a kind of becoming, marked by transitions, transformations and the inexorable progress towards death. There is more than one kind of death possible, of course. Serious disability may allow people to live for years and years, for an entire span of life, and yet force death of self and the painful recreation of some new self. Narrative plays a variety of roles in this grim terrain. Combined with this, narrative is often an important part of the reconstitution of lives that have been severely traumatized or transformed by severe illness. While some elders were uninterested in discussing either the causes of their sickness or possible cures, others provided a variety of commentaries on what had happened to them in the past and current situation. Nearly all of these involved an implicit but nonetheless barbed critique of medical care they had received.
