ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the affective difference in intimate relationships brought about when dying and death existentially cut partners apart. With a point of departure in a Deleuzian and Spinozist framework, affective difference and an intertwined concept of compassionate companionship are theorized in the chapter, based on an autophenomenographic analysis of death, dying, mourning and lesbian widowhood. The empirical material comprises excerpts from the author’s collection of poetic autobiographical texts written against the background of her experiences, some years ago, when her long-term lesbian partner died from cancer after several years of illness. What does it mean when one partner is becoming-corpse, while the other is becoming-widow? Which corpo-affectivities are involved? These questions guide the chapter’s affect-theoretical reflections, together with a notion of compassionate companionship developed in queer resistance to the normative term ‘relative’, which in discourses of healthcare systems is often used to refer to accompanying persons, traditionally associated with relations defined by biological kinship or heterosexual partnership. With the notion of ‘compassionate companionship’, the chapter reframes the notion of ‘relative’ in a queer, affect-theoretical and posthuman context.
