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Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how people with dementia and their family members try to find the "right" time for euthanasia by negotiating divergent horizons. This involves negotiating the temporal distance between present and future, in which the future demands action now, while being held off as a "not yet."

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I show how people with dementia and their family members, in trying to find the "right" time for euthanasia, negotiated divergent horizons and the extent to which they considered the future to be imminent. For many interlocutors in my ethnographic research on the end of life with dementia in the Netherlands, the imagined future with dementia was a reason to request euthanasia, which they saw as a way to prevent an otherwise inevitable, and apocalyptic future. However, timing euthanasia with dementia is extremely difficult and often results in the deferral of established boundaries. In requesting euthanasia, the person with dementia needs to define and confirm the boundaries of what they consider a life (not) worth living.

In this process, divergent temporal horizons emerge as perspectives and insights differ between people with dementia, their family members, and medical professionals, as to the timelines of when and how these boundaries are approaching or being reached. Collaboratively, they seek to navigate the agonizing trade-off between being 'too early' for euthanasia and the fear of being 'too late,' continually testing out images of the unwanted future against changing circumstances in the present. Hence, contributing to an emerging anthropology of temporality, I argue that the negotiation between differing temporal imaginaries involves a process of establishing, collapsing, and renegotiating the temporal distance between present and future, in which the imagined future demands and legitimizes action now, while also being held off as a continuous 'not yet.'