A presentation from the BSA Death, Dying and Bereavement Conference held on 19 November 2012.

1. Becoming the Older Generation:
Love, Loss and the Midlife Transition
Bethany Morgan Brett
University of Essex
BSA Social Aspects of Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group Annual Symposium: Death and the
Family
19th November 2012

2. THE NEGOTIATION OF MIDLIFE:EXPLORING
THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF AGEING
 How do people feel about getting older?
 What are some of the common life experiences in midlife?
 Is midlife a time of existential crisis, or are there other
psychical processes are operating in midlife?
Creativity, generativity, disappointment and loss...
 What is the subjective experience of midlife and how is it
negotiated psychically, physically, socially and emotionally?

3. THE SAMPLE
 22 British born men and women
(45, 2-3 hour interviews in total)
 Aged between 39-58
 All had children, except one man.
 All heterosexual
 Predominantly white sample (one black woman)

4. A PSYCHO-SOCIAL APPROACH
Hollway and Jefferson’s Free Association Narrative Interview Method
(From Doing Qualitative Research Differently, 2000)
 Two interviews with each participant
1st Free Association
2nd Semi-Structured
 Field-notes
(Recording the Total Situation, Betty Joseph ,1983)
 Reflexive analysis
(What role did I (my SELF) play in the interview situation?)
 Holistic Approach.
(Looked at the Total Situation, Betty Joseph, 1983)

5. KEY THEMES
 Situating Midlife
 “The Fittest Corpse on the Block”: Exploring the Subjective
Experiences of the Ageing Body
 Growing Up and Growing Old: Negotiating the Generational Shift
 Remembered Pasts and Imagined Futures

6. GENERATIONAL SHIFT
 The upward movement of the generations. For those in midlife
this places them higher up in the hierarchy of the family tree.
 Has consequences for the way in which family roles and
relationships are arbitrated.
 Can evoke a range of emotions, from increased sense of
responsibility, maturity and wisdom to feelings of vulnerability,
insecurity and anxiety.
 It can have an effect on the way people think about their own
ageing process and mortality.

7. THE GENERATIONAL SHIFT
When the older generation dies and the midlife individual moves into
the older position, there may be the sense that they are next in line
and the generational buffer between them and death has now gone.
„such a death brings to the fore one‟s own mortality…when a parent
dies the adult child is next in line, the buffer is gone‟ (Sprang and
McNeil,1995, 21).
It sort of makes you feel, you know, that you‟re older. You
know, „cause when your parents are not there… in a sense taking
their place in the scheme of things....And you just think we‟ve all
moved up one…. (Alex, aged 52)

8. THE GENERATIONAL BUFFER
I mean in some ways, with my parents still, I think well my parents
are still here, so for us to be discussing death and things for our own
deaths seems a bit I don‟t know, not stupid but irrelevant because
my parents are still here. We haven‟t taken the mantle up, so to
speak, to become the older generation yet, that is the only way I can
put it. There is a line to follow. (Anna, aged 46)
Anna:…I have got a grandmother. So you see I am third in line.
[Laughs]
Interviewer: Back of the queue!
Anna: Back of the queue! Do you know what I mean?

9. SHUNTING UP THE GENERATIONS
I saw my dad last week for this day out, for the first time I, the way
he was walking and the way he was looking, he‟s lost a lot of
weight you see, and I thought “my God dad, you look old!” and
that‟s the first time I‟ve really taken stock of how he was walking
and how he was looking and that frightened me because I‟m
thinking, especially because of the way my thoughts are, I thought
“Oh my God!” because I see everything happening in stages and
everything and I think everything and everybody moves on a stage
to another level don‟t they? And I thought “Oh my God, my dad‟s
moved on to that next level!” which means I now shunt up and take
his place! And that frightens me. (Angela, aged 49)

10. SEPARATION AND ATTACHMENT IN MIDLIFE
“the loss of a parent evokes all the old fears and threats
of the lost child” (Pritchard, 1995: 153)
To lose a parent in adulthood is “difficult to cope with
because they make the individual‟s personal world an
unsafe and unpredictable place”. (Archer, 1999: 213)
“when parents die we lose our sense of being a child”.
(Anna, 46)
“I am now an orphan” (Beverley, 56)

11. SEPARATION AND ATTACHMENT IN MIDLIFE
I suppose I want her to die really. I mean I will be sad. I will be sad
in some ways and I think I‟ve purposely distanced myself from the
emotional bond sometimes. I think people are very flexible. I could
easily find myself getting back into more of a sort of son/mother
relationship and being terrified of her dying. (Jeff, aged 48)

12. SEPARATION AND ATTACHMENT IN MIDLIFE
„…what I‟m hoping for when my mother dies, or when we can‟t
look after her any more- that will suddenly be a lot more freedom
than I‟ve had. Yes, I‟m hoping that it will be a comfortable time
where I can do a bit of travelling and do the things that I want and
feel that when I‟m going to work I don‟t have to. I can just do that‟.
(Jeff, 48)

13. SEPARATION AND ATTACHMENT IN MIDLIFE
For my mother‟s health, one of the GPs diagnosed that my mother
had bowel cancer from the blood tests and this was about a year
back and I suddenly thought I had a thrill go through me, that this is
an escape, an escape for me from all this being tied down not being
able to go on holidays and things like that. But it‟s an escape for
mum from all the pain and all the other things that she has to go
through. But of course the GP got it wrong so it was nothing of the
kind [laughs] I suppose that‟s a good test of my reaction to mum.
(Jeff, aged 48)

14. CONCLUSIONS
Generational shift
 A psychological buffer?
 Responsibility
 Liberating?
 Conflict
 Anticipatory mourning
 The midlife „orphan‟

15. SELECTED REFERENCES
 Archer, J (1999)The Nature Of Grief, London: Routledge
 Craib, I., (1994) The Importance of Disappointment, London:
Routledge
 Erikson, E., (1963) Childhood and Society, New York: W.W.
Norton and company
 Freud, S., (1991, 1917, 1915c) „Mourning and Melancholia‟, On
Metapsychology (11) London: Penguin
 Joseph, B., (1983) Transference: The Total Situation, London:
Routledge
 Jaques, E., (1965) „Death and the Midlife Crisis‟, International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, (46) 502-514
 Pritchard, C. (1995) Suicide- The Ultimate Rejection?, Open
University Press, Buckingham
 Sprang, G., McNeil, J., (1995) The Many Faces of

16. E-THESIS
Morgan Brett, Bethany Rowan (2010) The Negotiation of Midlife:
Exploring the Subjective Experience of Ageing, PhD Thesis, The
University of Essex
The University of Essex Institutional Repository
http://repository.essex.ac.uk/2394/
The British Library, EThOS
http://ethos.bl.uk/
bmorga@essex.ac.uk