There is a scene in the film Take This Waltz (Polley, 2011): three young women are in a swimming-pool shower room and one of them says, “Sometimes, I just want something new, you know.” The camera pans to a group of naked old women as one of that group says, “New things get old just like the old things do.” All of us who are fortunate enough to live a full life span will get old. Age shifts our perspective to one that is able to imagine and contemplate the feel, the look, the knowing of oldness. For many young and middle-aged people, contemplating or imagining themselves as ageing is an impossibility. It appears that, in Western industrial culture, it is easy to compartmentalize older people into groups of descriptors like ‘dear but doddering,’ ‘old bag,’ ‘old codger,’ dementia, care homes, decline, selfish generation, Jurassic, worn out, senile, wise, slow, independent, and so on. Each of these words or phrases brings to mind strong images as they signify meanings and stereotypes of old people in our culture. In part, this book is an attempt to create a layered understanding of ageing that reflects the complexity of the people who participated in the research. Their lives are multi-dimensional, and I hope that this book does justice to that and their most intimate narratives, as they were relayed to me.

The prismatic lens

I have argued in this book that time, ageing, embodiment, and identity are profoundly interwoven. I have also looked at the specificity and universality of ageing. Together these ideas call on us to revise the way we analyze old age, from a singular state to looking at the subtleties and differences in ageing people, in general, and ageing cohorts, in particular. We currently engage only with the larger differences between ageing persons. On the one hand, there is a good deal of emphasis on dementia, and, on the other, a focus on healthy ageing, but within those two poles, and all the space in between, there is still a notion that ageing is ageing, is ageing, is ageing. This book presents a new framework for understanding that time, body, and identity are defining aspects of ageing.