Dying Requires Latency. Organized Palliative Care Between the Poles of Acting and Experiencing

In sociological studies on hospices and palliative care units, it is often criticized that the organizational form of such facilities shapes the experience of the dying. Using problem-centered expert interviews with doctors and nurses as well as narrative interviews with dying persons, this study examines the criteria according to which all those involved attribute opportunities for action and the experience of dying to themselves and to others. This way we can show that professional actors experience the process of dying as "good" if it can be interpreted as a shared experience of professional actors on the one hand and dying people on the other hand, who wanted the process to happen in this way. This is remarkable against the background of another finding of this study; namely, the systematic differences between the perspectives of professional actors on the one hand and dying persons on the other when experiencing the process. While the dying in our study experience their dying as a threatening discontinuity, the professional actors experience dying as a continuously expected process. The consensus fiction of the shared experience of dying obviously represents a helpful expansion of the options for dealing with dying, since the irreconcilability between ideal and practice, the differences between the perspectives of those dying, and the professional actors and thus the insoluble problem of finiteness can be kept invisible. Anyone examining hospices and palliative care units should reckon with enormous freedom in the work of interpretation, which creates latency in dying.