Worried Lives

Abstract

For some people advancing age is a time of uncertainty and vulnerability. Often an event such as an illness or a fall is the trigger to the realization that one is vulnerable, a state that may change one’s attitude to the whole of living. Hepworth (2000) lists vulnerability and risk as one of the key issues of ageing alongside: ‘body and self; self andothers; objects, places and spaces; and futures’ (p. 9). He writes of the ‘risks associated with physical frailty and with particular places and spaces, such as a high crime area of an inner city’ (p. 9). In a later section, drawing on Leder (1990) he notes that people live most of their lives ‘without being fully aware of the internal workings of the body which, when it is free of pain, disability and illness, we experience as “absent” ’ (p. 38).