Dying as a Collective Encounter: Relationality and Affect at the End of Life

The end of life is replete with relational complexities. Yet, despite the work of humanities and social science scholars in the field of death and dying, our final days and weeks are still often framed through a highly individualistic lens. As a result, the collective encounters of dying can become sidelined within the management of an individual's embodied journey. This, in some cases, has the effect of obscuring the presence and power of collective affective intensities in shaping the experience of dying. In this paper, we seek to recentre dying as a collective encounter, drawing on the experiences of people receiving care at a palliative care unit in the last few weeks or days of their life, and exploring three key affective tensions: proximity and distance, obligation and negation and acceptance and refusal. This relational framing of dying as tussle and tension allows us to comprehend the inevitable push-and-pull between the multiple bodies, subjects and (shifting) atmospheres of dying which evade atomistic, individualistic configurations of dying, often perpetuated by its medical management.