ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the analysis of juggling. The staff's juggling consists of organizing a number of potentially shifting treatment and care tasks. The range of potential problems a staff faces is measurably reduced by the systematic routing of dying patients into the appropriate wards of a hospital. Despite the institutional mechanisms for standardizing trajectories and the structural resources available for dealing with them, the organization of work is constantly in delicate balance. Among trajectories that do include recognizable last weeks or days, few major classes are especially important. In American hospitals, social workers tend self-consciously to become "grief-workers", attempting with professional deliberateness to "work through" the grief of relatives; this is perhaps most noticeable on pediatric wards. A slow trajectory often gives the patient opportunities to come to terms with his own mortality, for his awareness and understanding may develop sufficiently early so that he can confront his dying.
