Paper short abstract:

How are personhood and the worth of life practiced in the context of everyday life? This paper draws on interview-based research to explore how friends respond to the onset of dementia. At stake are the making and unmaking of persons, relationships, and the worth of life at the margins of aging.

Paper long abstract:

How are personhood and the worth of life practiced in the context of everyday life? This paper explores such questions empirically, drawing on interview-based research about friendship and dementia. Dementia progressively erodes the capacities for memory, language, and cognition that tend to be regarded as the necessary foundation of individual identity and personhood. In the process, dementia also challenges friendship relations: a friend with dementia may lose the capacity to engage in the activities that have been enjoyed in common, may lose the memory of shared histories, and may no longer be able to produce the expected signs of recognition. In comparison with kinship, where obligations to care are more generally recognized (though clearly not always fulfilled), it is less clear what friendship means, allows, or requires in the face of dementia. How do people confronting the onset of cognitive losses in a friend make sense of this situation, and how do these sensibilities guide social action? If persons are socially constructed, then it is vital to understand how this happens in contexts where the outcome is very uncertain. Will friends, or others whose connection is at least initially more tenuous, "hold someone in personhood" when cognitive losses render claims to personhood fragile? Or will they retreat, withdraw, and thus contribute to the erosion of personhood in situations of dementia? The consequences can be enormous. Indeed, at stake is nothing less than the making and unmaking of persons, relationships, and the worth of life at the margins of aging.