Based on a cross-disciplinary analysis — carried out by a medical doctor and a psychologist — as well as a psychoanalytical, philosophical, and ethnological reading of a clinical case encountered by both authors in a palliative care service, we identify and explore some of the issues related to speech and to the relationship of care in the particular context of the end-of-life period. Our reflections have led us to explore the following points. In some cases, serious and incurable diseases are diagnosed and announced to patients before they have experienced it in their own bodies. At this stage, the disease therefore only exists on the basis of an interpretation of biological and radiological test results, provided by a “knowing figure.” In this specific context, we question the stakes and effects of this person's discourse, which absolutely contradicts the patient's permanent and continuous bodily experience. Throughout the stages of a serious disease, physical pain can have a range of different effects. On a relational level, it can represent a kind of screen onto which the existential suffering of the patient is projected and communicated to others in complaints. Simultaneously, in terms of the patient's psychic economy, this pain sucks up all the available energy, like a black hole, and thus considerably impoverishes the subject's self. We propose to study pain during the end-of-life period in terms of the functions it could perform, in response to the subjective impasses with which palliative care patients may be confronted. Finally, an anthropological reading raises the question of “voodoo death” and of the doctor's shamanic position — particularly in palliative care —, which we found to be relevant theoretical illustrations of how some patients can heed and believe a knowing figure's words. Some acts, words, or attitudes towards the palliative care patient may be experienced by the subject or their loved ones as a prediction of their imminent death, leaving little room for the desire to participate in life and hindering the opportunity to project oneself into a possible future.