Interruptions to Cultural Life Scripts: Cancer Diagnoses, Contextual Age, and Life Narratives

Age serves as a basis for assigning status and regulating social interaction across all societies. Members of the cultural group socialize new members into the rules and roles that are associated with different chronological ages and age categories. These socially constructed age norms result in cultural life scripts. The events expected to occur reflect a positive bias, resulting in an idealized life script. Serious illnesses serve as an interruption to the idealized life script creating a tension between this ideal and the real of the lived experience. This study explores the nature of interrupted life narratives by analyzing comments related to aging made by people diagnosed with cancer and their spousal caregivers. Their comments reveal the ways in which aging expectations, chronological age, and health are intertwined. Because a serious illness is typically expected in very old age, when it occurs at a younger age both the individual with cancer and his or her caregiver struggle to make sense of this interruption to their anticipated life narratives. Poor health status leads to age relativism; that is, perceptions that the individual is not acting his or her chronological age. For married couples, adapting to illness as a couple operates in similar ways as it does for the individual. Their identity as a couple is challenged by the illness, and they struggle to redefine their relationship to each other and to their social world.