ABSTRACT
Although death itself is a predominantly biological event, death and dying carry social, cultural and political significance. The chapter outlines the evaluation of particular kinds of death as 'good' or 'bad'—;;a distinction that is central to the practice of end-of-life care. It includes questions about quality of death in the semi-structured interviews with hospice-based healthcare professionals, and looks for explicit references to this in the healthcare professional online data with the help of corpus tools. The chapter provides an overview of the literature in healthcare practice and linguistics on death. It considers the results from interviews separately from the results from the online forum posts and focus more on the former, and how the metaphor patterns found in the interviews play out in the healthcare professional online data. The chapter also outlines the descriptions of good and bad deaths in the online data had to be obtained in a very different way from the direct elicitation of the interviews.
