ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how dying and suffering are shared between the person at the end of their life, people, children, partners and friends. It seeks to raise questions about the affective dimensions of caring, challenge simplistic assumptions about who is suffering and the purpose of care, and how 'caring relations' can be experienced as suffering in and of themselves. The chapter reveals a range of relational, inter-subjective experiences often concealed within healthcare settings and indeed the dying process. These include what carers experience in terms of emotions and suffering therein during the end of life. One important reason that the experiences and suffering of informal carers (family, partners, friends and 'significant others') has been largely overlooked is the cultural reification of the moral and ethical value of informal care. Caring becomes a practice of gift-giving, sacrifice and duty as a 'good carer'. Conversely, dying becomes an act of performing 'dignity' and 'grace', as one attempts to produce a 'good death'.
