Indian thought conceives of life in four normative stages: of student, householder, forest-dweller and renouncer. A metaphysical theory related to the conception of life-stages is that of the ends or purposes of life: appropriate conduct, material well-being, physical satisfaction and liberation. The theory of the ends of life is reconstructed here in the light of contemporary philosophical discussions about the meaning of life. The first three ends are part of a world-oriented attitude; the last end, of world-transcending contemplation. Among age-neutral and age-specific ways of relating life stages and life ends, that of taking old age as the time for the renunciatory stage is important and is examined in the context of the two main theories of meaning: world-oriented and world-transcending. Old age is secondary to earlier stages in a world-oriented theory, more significant in the world-transcendent one. However, both theories, seen independently, are paradoxical. In a synthesis, the world-transcendence of renunciation in old age is paramount in Indian thought, but worldly action is significant because renunciation depends on the richness of the life renounced. This reconstruction of an ancient ideal is offered as a philosophical paradigm for transculturally relevant attitudes to life in old age.

Examination of the well-being and living conditions of older widows and widowers reveals ways in which adaptation to loss of the partner in later life is influenced by gender. This article compares the results of two Dutch studies, one on men and one on women between the ages of 60 and 75, living independently and widowed three to five years earlier. The same combination of quantitative and qualitative methods was used in these studies. The results indicate remarkable similarities in the well-being of the widows and widowers. Gender influences the availability of resources such as income, education and freedom from health restrictions, with widowers demonstrating clear advantages compared to widows. In the area of relational resources, widows who are well adapted have more varied sources of support, including close female friends and supportive neighbours in addition to children. Widowers benefit more from the presence of new partners or partner-like relationships; the tendency of many widowers to rely strongly on children is a disadvantage. Few significant differences were found in the relational needs acknowledged by widows and widowers; however, acknowledging the need for intimacy is differentially related to life satisfaction for widowed men and women. An unexpected finding is the effect of gender on life satisfaction, which remains when other variables have been entered into the equation in regression analysis. Several possible interpretations for this gender factor are provided; these involve the possibility of greater diversity in the ways in which women adapt to widowhood, women's special virtuosity in relationships, and a kind of flexibility that is developed in the course of women's lives which helps them adapt to major change later life, despite structural disadvantages in comparison to men.

This paper compares findings on the distribution of support networks in the City of Liverpool and in rural communities in North Wales. It demonstrates that while support network type is highly correlated with a wide range of demographic and social variables in both urban and rural samples, the nature of the relationships are not always comparable. The paper shows how cultural, migration and socio-economic factors interact to affect the formation of different types of support networks. As a result of a more stable elderly population, more old people in Liverpool have network types able to provide a high level of informal care and support.

Various studies have dealt more or less directly with qualitative questions concerning social services provided in the home. While as a result of such studies the general characteristics of home services of importance to elderly people are quite well known, this is not the case regarding the relative importance assigned to such characteristics. Personal interviews using the ‘Multiattribute Utility Technology’ (MAUT) were used. This procedure organises the attributes in a ‘tree’ structure for comparing the relative importance & ranking of different quality attributes. A random sample of 180 receivers of home-help services aged 65 to 95 and living in a rural, small town and city area were interviewed. The interviewed persons were asked to rank-order according to personal importance each grouping of quality attributes. The relative values of the different qualities were determined, using a scale with a range from 0 to 100 points. Continuity, especially Staff Continuity, was the most important quality attribute together with Suitability and Personal Relation. Availability and Influence were the least important quality attributes. The characteristics studied had largely the same relative importance for all older people, irrespective of category.

This paper is about how the informal care givers of people recently diagnosed as suffering from dementia perceive and describe that condition. Data are drawn from semi-structured interviews with 106 such care givers (mainly adult children and spouses) carried out in a London Borough and a southern English market town. People's accounts of how they defined what was happening to their relative (his/her condition) could be divided into several categories; these are shown to be based on a number of different parameters: for example, normal versus abnormal; orderly versus unpredictable; simple versus complex; an illness versus not an illness. The reasons for the wide variety of understandings of dementia are examined; it is suggested that it may be due to general lack of information or poor communication with health service staff; to a need to choose a definition which accords with a particular kind of relationship with the dementia sufferer; to the kind of self-presentation favoured by the sufferer; or to the desire to achieve certain kinds of end within particular social contexts.

Leo Tolstoy's short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, is considered as a case history of a seriously flawed life and a consequently inept coping with death. Never having truly lived fully, never having been committed to passionate love or work, Ilyitch in his dying review finds his experience absurdly empty. His death comes to be seen as superficial and meaningless, like his life. It is suggested that people need to be educated for life's failures and death's inevitability.