Deadlines: doing times in (Dutch) hospice

Abstract

For a person to enter a Dutch hospice as resident, a clearly articulated deadline is needed: a life expectancy of three months or less. This paper argues that this institutional timeframe of a singular, clock-timed period of more or less linearly approaching death (the end of time), affords life to unfold in hospice as a relatively clockless multitude of temporal orderings enacted by staff and residents (the time of the end). Based on a period of ethnographic fieldwork in hospices and focusgroup interviews with hospice staff, I analyse how temporal orderings manifest and intersect in different ways. The quality of these intersections presence end-of-life normativities in ways that may be instructive when designing and reflecting on end-of-life care.