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This article examines the content of spontaneous discourse on death among people aged 85 on average. From two surveys on life in old age, the author extracted comments referring to death made by 27 people in various social conditions, the great majority living at home. These comments are broken down into five categories: death of age-peers, seen as no longer there to corroborate the subject’s position in the social world; precarity of life in old age, with signs of increasing physical fragility, weariness and risk of dying; death of close family members, who have been crucial in the construction of the subject’s personal identity but are no longer there to attest to the subject’s involvement in a private life; dying at home, with a refusal to end life in conditions considered abject; and the inability to do anything, expressing the distress at having to abandon the activities considered most meaningful in the subject’s life. The cases examined show that the probability of déprise1, or, on the contrary, of obtain new grips (“prise”) on the world, vary considerably with the individual: the place held in society determines the distribution of resources right through to the end of life.