Family practices during life-threatening illness : exploring the everyday.

This thesis explores the experiences of individuals living in a family where a
member is dying or has a life-threatening illness. It focuses in particular upon
how families are actively produced in the everyday `doing' of day-to-day
family life (Morgan, 1996) in circumstances of severe ill-health and when
facing death. Using an ethnographic approach combining informal, in-depth
interviews with 9 families and participant observation on a hospice ward, the
research provides insight into how families experience themselves as family in
the `here-and-now' of their daily lives. It will be argued that in both popular
culture and theoretical work there is a pervasive tendency to associate death
with crisis and that the more ordinary, everyday and mundane aspects of dying
experiences are less well understood. Therefore, the analysis of family lives
presented here moves away from the more familiar model of emotional crisis
and rupture in relation to severe ill-health and dying, to ask new questions
about the `everydayness' of people's feelings and experiences during this time.
A more nuanced picture of living with life-threatening illness and dying is
provided as the data chapters explore the everyday and mundane in relation to
families' experiences. Analysing empirical data about various aspects of day-to-day life - including eating practices, spatial dynamics and material objects -
the thesis shows how ill-health and dying are not discrete ontological
experiences existing outside and separate from everyday life. Rather, in paying
attention to the `doing' of being a family day-to-day, this research brings more
squarely into view, the everyday as a lived experience (Felski, 1999) within
which families come to `know' their experiences of illness and dying.