Doing home: palliative care in 'third places'.

Abstract

People living with life-limiting illnesses often talk about their ideal experience of 'care' as one where the care itself is hidden. Situated in the sociological literature on places and materialities of palliative care, in this paper I examine the hiding of care in a small, non-clinical respite house in an Australian city. Care is hidden by the at-homeness that staff, guests and volunteers alike all do. Working with Oldenburg's notion of 'third places,' I show how in this illness context the separation between home, work and other places in the community can blur, with respite services 'standing in' for the family home, or acting as a 'homely' extension of the hospital. Such places meet diverse needs beyond pure sociability as in Oldenburg's original conceptualisation.