Short abstract:

This paper reflects on temporality in relation to life-limiting illness and death. Doing so might help us pursue an ’everyday ethics’ that moves in other directions or against biomedical logics and concerns.

Long abstract:

Time—how we spend it, how it unfurls—is often discounted as mundane in the busyness of life. In the face of life-limiting illness, however, time comes to the fore, pressing on the everyday and on possibilities for and of futurity. How might focusing on the ostensibly mundane notion of ‘time’ help us attend to modes of living and dying well? This paper reflects on temporality in relation to life-limiting illness and death, relations between tenuous biological health-status and sociality, and the socio-political challenges presented by living and dying in what might be called ‘shadow times’: those disavowed times that exist on the underside of normative time. The shadow times examined here are ‘diagnostic time,’ ‘prognostic time,’ ‘terminal time,’ and ‘mourning time.’ Paying attention to the everyday experience of time in life-limiting illness, death, and beyond might allow us to recognize the regulatory imperatives of normative time and the slippages between normative and lived shadow time. Importantly, doing so might help us pursue an ’everyday ethics’ (Pols 2023) that moves in other directions or against biomedical logics and concerns—to do justice to those living in the complicated ontological ambiguities of lived shadow time, where we see the imbricated folding of life and death.