Ageing and frailty: a spiritual perspective of the lived experience

ABSTRACT

Frailty awaits many of us if we live long enough. Frailty may often be seen as a precursor to the process of dying and as such can be a confronting life and death challenge; one that we cannot fully comprehend until or unless we are experiencing it ourselves. It is only through listening to the narrative of those making these final life journeys that we can learn, first what the experience is like, find commonalities and differences in the experience and then to begin to learn how we may more effectively walk beside those who are making this crucial final life journey. This paper outlines current understandings of frailty from a biomedical and psychosocial perspective before considering a spiritual perspective of the lived experience of frail older people in residential and community care through their stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Frailty
• aging
• spirituality
• inner strength
• self-transcendence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms used for all participants.

2. Self-transcendence can perhaps be best explained in the term Frankl (1988) used to describe it – to ‘self-forget’. It means that the person is sufficiently comfortable to be able to look beyond the self, and become ‘other centred’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Charles Sturt University [Public & Contextual Theology Research Centre (PaCT].