Abstract
This chapter provides an autoethnographic account of the concurrent transformations that both the dying person, the next of kin and the home have to go through for death to occur at home. The notions of liminality and territoriality are employed to explore how management of the traffic of professional caregivers and technologies across its boundaries, transforms home into a temporary place in which the coalescence of conflicting and cooperating forces associated with dying can be handled. The normative dimension of the narrative, concerning the way in which the inevitability of death is aligned with the values endorsed by the dying person and those who must live on, is made explicit by attending to the alignments and frictions among the ways of doing that are constitutive of practices of care at the end of life.
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Notes
- 1.
The original French edition, Les rites de passage, was published in 1908, but was not translated into English until 1960.
- 2.
Viktor Turner considered work on liminality to be about ‘problems of thresholds, transitions, and margins in ritual, myth, literature, politics, and utopian ideas and practices’ (Turner 1968: xvi; emphasis mine). The popularity that the notion of liminality enjoys in academic work today derives mainly from its elaboration as margin or marginality: the ‘betwixt and between’ status of liminal personae, existing on the boundary between two distinct determinate states and therefore resisting classification in either of them; marginal places and activities like beaches, wildernesses or carnivalesque celebration that temporarily suspend the disciplining power of the dominant culture, or groups of people who define their identity outside or on the margins of mainstream dominant culture as an act of resistance or a source of renewal.
- 3.
Entrainment occurs when one process is affected by and incorporated into another process. It occurs in physical, biological and social processes. For the entrained entity, entrainment in another process creates path dependency within the entraining process and an energy gradient that makes it easier to go with the flow; it will take more resolve and commitment to get out of it.
- 4.
Registration as a new patient with the hospital triggered an invitation from the hospital’s gynaecologist who would formally be responsible for Truus’ treatment. In the gynaecological oncologist we met, we also encountered again the treatment tenacity that characterized the oncological centre in the Netherlands. He urged Truus to reconsider life-prolonging treatment and fight for her life. Truus cordially declined.
- 5.
Sedation is a pharmacological procedure that aims to reduce the patient’s level of consciousness.
- 6.
The ironic similarity with (and critique of) the Windows user interface has not escaped me: ‘To end, push Start.’
- 7.
The source domain of the metaphor of the orca swimming just under the surface of the water, breaking it once and a while to breathe, are the orcas that used to follow their food (herring) into the fjord system on Narvik’s doorstep during the winter months. We didn’t swim with them but, standing on the bow of a boat watching them in the low light of winter against the backdrop of snow-covered mountains in Hellemobotn, we were close enough (at a distance of just a few feet) to perceive and appreciate the muscular strength and the gracefulness of their black-and-white bodies.
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Wackers, G. (2020). Making a Place for Dying at Home: Liminality, Territoriality and Care at the End of Life. In: Pasveer, B., Synnes, O., Moser, I. (eds) Ways of Home Making in Care for Later Life. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0406-8_11
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