A View from Life’s Edge: Discovering What Really Matters with Older Women Across the Globe

In today’s death-denying, success-driven society, older women’s countercultural voices call for our attention. Recounting emotionally charged conversations from across the world, A View from Life’s Edge reflects on women’s comfort with impending death, gratitude forged by catastrophe, and humility that makes way for wonder.

Speaking with nearly one hundred women over the age of eighty in four locations--northern Iceland, south India, a retirement community in California, and a convent in upstate New York--Corinne G. Dempsey finds that, as we near life’s end, we gain clarity about what really matters in life. Women’s stories and reflections, in which sorrow and loss are central to a life well lived, help to expand our sense of what it means to be human.

Drawing on the paradoxical wisdom of world religions and mystical traditions to frame late-life tendencies across cultures, Dempsey portrays these accounts as a corrective to mainstream values that defeat and diminish us. Dempsey encourages us to turn away from ageist fears rather than denying life’s inevitable end. Learning from older women’s perspectives, we might move their edge-of-life views closer to the center.

CORINNE G. DEMPSEY is a professor and the chair of religious studies at Nazareth University in Rochester, NY. Her previous works include Bridges between Worlds: Spirits and Spirit Work in Northern Iceland and Bringing the Sacred down to Earth: Adventures in Comparative Religion.