Palliative Care Conversations: Clinical and Applied Linguistic Perspectives (Language and Social Life [LSL], 12)

There is no script, either for dying or for the time just preceding death. Of course, none of us – even those who specialize in communicating about alleviating suffering in end-of-life contexts - has done dying before ourselves.
-Introduction of Palliative Care Conversations

Palliative Care Conversations by David and Robert Gramling emerged out of the interactional work of hundreds of people talking with one another about living and dying in settings of serious illness. These people are women and men, gay and straight, of color and white, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Wicca, agnostic, and atheist, low-income and affluent, monolingual and multilingual, old and young.

The interactional work these people do, for and with one another, is the work of emotion, understanding, spirituality, empathy, morality, comfort, expertise, logistics, nourishment, community, care, knowledge, humor, doubt, and imagination.

Palliative Care Conversations is the first of its kind to offer intensive conversation analysis on patient-clinician interactions in the context of palliative medicine. The book focuses on a series of individual case studies of conversations that revolve, in each case, around one key critical term that is often evoked or understood differently by clinicians and patients.