Ready to give up on life: The lived experience of elderly people who feel life is completed and no longer worth living

Abstract

In the Netherlands, there has been much debate on the question whether elderly people over 70 who are tired of life and who consider their life to be completed, should have legal options to ask for assisted dying. So far there has been little research into the experiences of these elderly people. In order to develop deliberate policy and care that targets this group of elderly people, it is necessary to understand their lifeworld. The aim of this paper is to describe the phenomenon 'life is completed and no longer worth living' from a lifeworld perspective, as it is lived and experienced by elderly people. Between April to December 2013, we conducted 25 in-depth interviews. A reflective lifeworld research design, drawing on the phenomenological tradition, was used during the data gathering and data analysis. The essential meaning of the phenomenon is understood as 'a tangle of inability and unwillingness to connect to one's actual life', characterized by a permanently lived tension: daily experiences seem incompatible with people's expectations of life and their idea of whom they are. While feeling more and more disconnected to life, a yearning desire to end life is strengthened. The experience is further explicated in its five constituents: 1) a sense of aching loneliness; 2) the pain of not mattering; 3) the inability to express oneself; 4) multidimensional tiredness; and 5) a sense of aversion towards feared dependence. This article provides evocative and empathic lifeworld descriptions contributing to a deeper understanding of these elderly people and raises questions about a close association between death wishes and depression in this sample.

Attitudes Toward Active Voluntary Euthanasia Among Community-Dwelling Older Subjects

“…As well, our findings provide also evidence for the spread of an increasingly positive attitude toward physician-assisted dying, particularly among the more educated and culturally open-minded younger-old generation (as confirmed by the significant association of acceptability of AVE with the 65 to 74 age group, higher educational levels, and more progressive cultural attitudes). Such major openness among older subjects still in good overall conditions was observed also in other studies (see Malpas, Mitchell, & Johnson, 2012;Roesinger et al, 2016;van Wijngaarden, Leget, & Goossensen, 2015).…”

“…The significant extension of late-life expectancy since the late 20th century has delayed the age of dying in contemporary society (Tosato, Zamboni, Ferrini, & Cesari, 2007). This has also increased the role played by medical interventions in extending and shaping older people's dying, highlighting different aspects of the dying experience in later life, such as the degree of individual awareness, autonomy and choice (to preserve personal dignity and to control pain and fear; Lloyd, 2013), and the related medicalizing practices (which can prolong or hasten the dying process; Murray, Kendall, Boyd, & Sheick, 2005).…”

Ethical uneasiness and the need for open-ended reflexivity: the case of research into older people with a wish to die

“…We think that in order to develop careful and responsible policy on this issue, it is a prerequisite to first gain a deep and robust understanding of this phenomenon and find out what is really at stake in the lives of these older people. Therefore, Downloaded by [83.87.214.253] at 23:36 08 November 2017 the aim of our empirical research project was to provide in-depth insight into what it means to feel that 'life is completed and no longer worth living' as lived and experienced by older people themselves (van Wijngaarden, Leget, & Goossensen, 2015a), so that policy development could be aligned with the needs and the concerns of the people at stake. We used a phenomenological approach adopting an open and non-judging attitude (Dahlberg, Dahlberg, & Nyström, 2008), not taking a stance in advance.…”

“…This experience of disconnectedness was further explicated in the following themes: (1) a sense of aching loneliness; (2) the pain of not mattering; (3) the (growing) inability to express oneself; (4) a multidimensional tiredness; and (5) a sense of aversion towards (feared) dependence (van Wijngaarden et al, 2015a).…”

“…On the other hand, they presented themselves as highly dependent on others when it came to their well-being. Their stories were full of anxiety, sadness and loneliness and a strong human desire to be visible, recognized, wanted, needed, valued, depended upon or attended to by others (van Wijngaarden et al, 2015a). Besides, it turned out that the wish to die was not at all clear, coherent and unambiguous; rather it was characterized by ambivalent feelings of being torn, expressed in words like: 'dilemma' , 'doubt' , 'a difficult balancing act' and 'a split position ' (van Wijngaarden, Leget, & Goossensen, 2016a).…”