Death and liminality: An ethnographic study of nursing home staff's experiences in an encounter with the dead body

Abstract

This paper investigates nursing home staff's experiences of the "final journey," when a resident's dead body is taken to the cold room. The account is based on data from ethnographic fieldwork in two nursing homes in Norway. Accompanying the dead body, staff found themselves "betwixt and between" - an anxious and ambiguous state, bordering on the uncanny. Liminality became a useful theoretical device in the data interpretation. The last offices - a rite of passage governing liminal states - provided a containing structure for this final journey but were not sufficient to banish the uncanny from the staff's experience.