Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In this ethnographic and participatory research project, we examine the lived practices through which an American cancer patient inhabits an important transition—the end of life. We ask how the patient, with the assistance of his heart doctor, whom the patient considers a “healer,” learns to accept death as a part of living. We address this question by examining audio and video recordings of medical consultations and informal events as well as email exchanges collected over two years. We utilize the Relational ontology framework (Raia 2020) to understand how “caring-for-the-Other catapulted into an unfamiliar world of facing uncertainty and death” is possible and unfolds within a dialogical activity. We show how by carefully listening and recruiting what is relevant in the patient’s life, the clinician’s talk engages in an activity that helps the patient build a narrative that is anchored in the patient’s life of purpose, of mattering, and a meaningful sense of the path of facing death as part of living. We also examine the multimodal resources (Goodwin 2000), including touch, used by participants in an encounter between a patient, his wife, and the doctor. Through examining storytelling in email exchanges between the patient (a college professor) and his students, we find the patient unwittingly becomes a “mentor in dying.” In this sense, the chapter challenges neoliberal biomedical myths of death as necessarily solitary, individuating, or heroic, in favor of a focus on “the communal and ongoing process of dying” (Craig 2018:4).</jats:p>