Samuel Beckett's "Rockaby": dramatizing the plight of the solitary elderly at life's end

Irish playwright Samuel Beckett's spare, compact, and provocative play Rockaby (1981) is a study in old age, isolation, and disengagement from life. In it, an elderly woman rocks in a chair while the audience hears a distant voice remembering her lifelong search for human contact or communion. The play dramatizes the woman's intense physical and psychological isolation and the last sputterings of her impulse to narrate. Such radical isolation may be a necessary precondition for a person relinquishing the narrating that Beckett equates with being, and surrendering unto death. Despite its apparent simplicity, the play powerfully explores the nature of aging in contemporary society, quality-of-life issues for the frail, solitary elderly in our communities and health-care institutions, and how the elderly prepare for life's end in a death-denying culture. Rockaby is thus a text that can help clinicians and other caregivers appreciate the predicament of solitary elderly persons nearing life's end and better understand how we all must manage one day the lonely, self-abnegating yet also paradoxically self-assertive act of dying.