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I have observed, as a matter of fact, that it is only people who exceed the age of ninety who attain euthanasia--who die, that is to say, of no disease, apoplexy or convulsion, and pass away without agony of any sort; nay, who sometimes even show no pallor, but expire generally in a sitting attitude, and often after a meal--or, I may say, simply cease to live rather than die. To come to one's end before the age of ninety, means to die of disease, in other words, prematurely.
--Zygmunt Bauman (1992, p. 19, fn 6)
It is appropriate that this special issue on "aging well" conclude, like the human life cycle, with death. Whether one ages well or not, one's ultimate fate remains the same. However, as individuals' abilities to age well are, in part, conditioned by how well they encountered the earlier stages of life, so too are they shaped by their anticipated abilities to die well.
Although death is the defining event of old age, there is a curious silence in gerontological circles about death's bearing on the aging experience. Even such pro-aged groups as the American Gerontology Society and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) rarely acknowledge the connection. The magazine of the AARP, Modem Maturity, for instance, does not allow even the advertising of wheelchairs or any product portraying old age unhealthily, let alone discussion of coping with fatal illnesses. This void exists in professional circles as well. One analysis of more than 2,600 articles published in the Gerontologist and the Journal of Gerontology found that less than 2% dealt with any aspect of death (Kearl, 1989, p. 125). An analogous content analysis of articles in the British Ageing and Society between 1981 and 1991 found less than 4% (Walter, 1993).
Nevertheless, over the past 3 decades, as the parameters of "successful" aging were being developed, there were concurrent changes in the highly publicized images of death. No longer were the depictions solely about those dying prematurely because of war, disease, poverty, or some natural calamity. Rather, increasing were the images of those desiring death or of those seeking to end the unwanted existences of loved ones, raising basic questions and moral dilemmas about the nature of good death: