Lessons on Aging and Dying: A Poetic Autoethnography

Lessons in Aging and Dying: A Poetic Autoethnography explores the experience of being elderly and facing the end of life through a collection of poems and narrative commentary. It is organized into 73 lessons, offering personal insights, cultural examinations, and anticipations of death. Written by an esteemed academic in communication and performance studies, the book is suitable for students and researchers in gerontology, end-of-life care, and performance studies.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 104 pages
Publication date: 08 December 2020
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Lessons in Aging and Dying: A Poetic Autoethnography delves into the profound experience of growing old and nearing the end of life. Presented as a collection of poems accompanied by narrative commentary, the book is organized into 73 lessons that can be read as personal curiosities, momentary realizations, farcical departures, embarrassing fears, therapeutic encounters, experiential truths, hopeful conjectures, and inevitable destinations. This book employs a poetic inquiry that invites the lyrical in narrative and poetic forms to engage with its subject matter. It also serves as an autoethnography that explores culture through the deployment of the self. Framed by introductory and concluding remarks, the book is structured around three developmental stages: Beginnings, From Here to There, and Endings. The initial pages, Beginnings, acknowledge the author's arrival at a place beyond middle age, marking the beginning of the end. The middle unit, From Here to There, portrays an unsettled settling in, driven by an ongoing tension between resistance and acquiescence. It serves as a transitional stage into Endings, the final section that anticipates the imminent arrival of death and speculates about how the author might meet his end. Together, these units offer spaces for identification, speculation, and resistance.

Published as part of the esteemed autoethnographic series Writing Lives: Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Narratives, this text is particularly suited for students and researchers in fields such as relational and family communication, gerontology and end-of-life care, and performance studies.

Weight: 184g
Dimension: 151 x 228 x 9 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367621896