Death and liminality: An ethnographic study of nursing home staff’s experiences in an encounter with the dead body

Abstract

This paper investigates nursing home staff’s experiences of the “final journey,” when a resident’s dead body is taken to the cold room. The account is based on data from ethnographic fieldwork in two nursing homes in Norway. Accompanying the dead body, staff found themselves “betwixt and between” – an anxious and ambiguous state, bordering on the uncanny. Liminality became a useful theoretical device in the data interpretation. The last offices – a rite of passage governing liminal states – provided a containing structure for this final journey but were not sufficient to banish the uncanny from the staff’s experience.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Emeritus Professor Wendy Hollway, School of Psychology, Open University, UK for guiding the interpretation group through the analysis process. We also would like to thank the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their constructive remarks.

Notes

1 A Norwegian concept, describing a rare and ambiguous state of ‘not truly being dead’ in the sense that any signs of life, including respiration, are so weak that they become undetectable (Hem & Kåss, 2018).

2 The first author conducted the fieldwork. Accounts written in the first person refer to the first author’s experiences in the field.

3 “Taken broadly, affectivity refers to the dimension of feeling and to the experience and expression of emotions and passions such as joy, fear, shame, excitement, hatred and love, including their micro-dynamics, expressions and phenomenology” (Stenner, 2013, p. 1). In this article, we use the word affect as connoting something less cognitive and more embodied and thereby something prior to what is directly communicable in words.

Additional information

Funding

This PhD-project is part of Work Package 4 in Multicultural workforce in nursing homes: Contemporary challenges, opportunities and potentials for the future in the Norwegian municipal care sector, MULTICARE, financed by the Research Council of Norway [reference number 256617].