ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mood of many elderly widowed adults, feeling the loss of their life’s partner in an acute way after 8 years, and resigned to the short time remaining to their own lives. It provides the example of a widowed elderly man, not because our emphasis will be confined to the elderly, but because the sense of loneliness and resignation captured by Sarah Jewett is a prescient indicator of our analysis results on age and aging. In the best of all possible worlds, a researcher interested in biopsychological constructs would use standardized personality tests and direct biomedical measures of health and physical well being. This was not possible in a study designed to measure several dimensions of the relationships between respondents and each of their parents and each of their children. Men perceive a great deal more change than women on the aging aspects of themselves.
