| Summary: | Focusing on the way a palliative care unit team negotiated one patient’s desire to smoke, going as far as to consider it an existential issue, we show how palliative care shapes the person as a being “at the end of life”. The analysis thus builds on David Sudnow’s proposal that end of life is not an already given state, but rather the passage from one state of being (alive) to another (dead). In this paper, we point out that palliative care encourages an expansion of the meaning of “dying” to include the multiple mendings and modulations encompassed in this passage. In this case, recognizing a person as being at the end of life not only implies that soon the person will be no more but, more specifically, that, even before that, some of his/her capacities will be affected.
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