Bearing the Burdens we (don’t Tend to) Bare

The burdens of older life, during what Peter Laslett calls the fourth-age, exaggerate feelings of fear and desire while resourcing despair. Some such burdens are borne from human corporeality. Others are socially constructed and afflict older persons further. A typology of burdens is introduced, identifying reflexive, transitive, and accusative burdens. The reflexive dirge of the person grieving their losses of competence, self-sufficiency, and independence includes a transitive counterpart, where a person’s self-perceived burden includes also the sense that one has become a burden to others. The accusative burden is experienced when persons are marked by others, catastrophically, as a burden. Regardless, these burdens must be given attention while attending to the ideations that prioritise independence but risk despair. Thus the relation between burdened self-image, despair, and late modern and policy preoccupations with independence will further focus such attention. Specifically, the prominence of independence in narratives of successful ageing will be interrogated, while inviting theological reflection on the reality of dependence and the nature of bodily life, together. That the Christian theological tradition teaches that human beings are bodies and are mutually dependent presses back against dogmas that prioritise independence and other icons of discrete subjectivity. Pointing toward Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of vicarious representative action, the reader is invited to consider again the kind of language in policy and for practice that might humanise persons in exchanges of responsible care(giving) and mutual dependence throughout the life course.