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Paper Short Abstract:

Love and friendship remake what is undone by the difficulties of daily life for elderly women in Lisbon, Portugal. If we see love as unconditional, and thus political, it can undo social life as it remakes it.

Paper Abstract:

Loss, in and of itself, has the ability to undo, to unravel (Pinto 2014). Losses of persons and other living beings, of places, and of things can undo people and their lives as they have lived it, changing one’s life, one’s subject position, sometimes forever. Losses can change how one views the world, others, and themselves, sometimes reinventing forms of knowledge and their production and reproduction. Losses can cause illness, disease, and madness, and be their results. Uncertainty is its own sort of loss, a loss of a seemingly dependable imagination that lends certainty to life circumstances and to governance on varying scales. But once uncertainty becomes chronic and all-encompassing, once most, if not all, aspects of life become entirely precarious, one’s life becomes undone – and later, hopefully, remade.

In a Catholic elder day center in Lisbon, two women have experienced many forms of undoing - primarily from loss of loved ones and changes in their physical and mental abilities over time. However, their unconditional love and care for one another has allowed them to remake what has been undone, to move forward despite what has been lost. Their combined capacity for love has manifested in a refusal to accept the sometimes brutal realities of aging and disability under late capitalism, and to fight for each other's access to care, dignity, and freedom. Life's uncertainties in old age that undo persons can thus, with the confidence and certainty of love, remake one's social life for the better.