‘Takin’ It One Day at a Time’

Abstract

In this article, I explore anticipation as a site of moral experience and moral willing when death may be nearby. Through an examination of the narratives of the wife of a hospice patient in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, I show that her commitment to not anticipate the course of her husband’s illness is a moral project pitted against biomedical modes of prognostication. In a context in which hospice care is the only option available for many older adults in poor health, I discuss the incommensurability between this position and the anticipatory horizon on which hospice care is predicated: the patient’s imminent death. I argue for an approach to this woman’s experience that takes into account the tendency for temporal orientations to be thrown into flux when death might be nearby, without reducing her commitment to not anticipate to mere avoidance or ‘denial’.

Anticipatory Grief in Dementia: An Ethnographic Study of Loss and Connection

“…In this article, I focus on accounts of family members who were concerned with the advancing decline of their relative with dementia, and who were in different ways anticipating further losses toward the end of life. This is not to say that the experiences of those who refrain from anticipation, are to be dismissed, as this too, as Flaherty ( 2019 ) notes, can be a temporal commitment and moral project. In the context of dementia, as I will further elaborate below, gradual cognitive and physical decline often provoke the uncanny feeling of “already losing” the person with dementia during the illness trajectory.…”