Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The Grey Tsunami metaphor is gaining momentum and a Google search returned with 70 million hits with projections to rise even higher in the next couple of years. This increasingly popular metaphor, and its many variations, is being used to describe the predicted "apocalyptic" effects of the aging baby boomer generation. In addition to popular media, professional registers and organizations have used such metaphors to title their reports. I argue that extensive use of such word choices not only propagate ageist sentiments but also cannot be ethically justified. By invoking - the aging population as a threat to healthcare, economy, and a continued future it deprives the concepts of personhood and citizenship from this highly variable and vulnerable population. Furthermore, it discourages more holistic and positivistic methods of investing in research for improving palliative care. The method I will use is the narrative ethics approach. I will use three different approaches; 1) narrative ethics as identifying voice, 2) word choice implications for elderly personhood, 3) mimetic content as re-defining citizenship. I believe this will be most appropriate because it disrupts the stifling of elderly individuals' narratives and individuality. Framing the elderly as a literal Grey Tsunami compounds more problems than would exist if this population was approached with an optimistic framework. Metaphors shape the way we think and thinking shapes the way we behave. There is a practical need for more hopeful metaphors to describe aging processes and with it new aging metaphors.