Negotiating Leave-Taking Events in the Palliative Medicine Unit

Abstract

In this article I explore the importance staff and relatives give to patients' social identity at the time of dying, death, and leave-taking in a palliative medical unit in Norway. I employ Timmermans' concept of death brokering and show how various patient identities are used to broker and negotiate the timing, content, and form of leave-taking events. In their end-of-life care, nurses strive to accommodate relatives and support them in their grief process. Making patient identities relevant illustrates the close relationships between maintenance of the integrity of the material body and maintenance of the integrity of the social person; this practice aligns biomedical and physical identities with biographical and personal identities. Maintenance of patients' social identity is not a uniform process. Throughout postmortem care, nurses and relatives oscillate between poles of nearness to and distance from the deceased, who paradoxically can be experienced as both socially alive and socially dead.