Constructing a World for Compassion: How Temporal Work Can Preserve Compassion in Extreme Contexts

Abstract

This article extends previous research on how compassion can be preserved in extreme contexts, highlighting the phenomenological experience of time in practices. Based on an ethnographic study of hospice care, we show how temporal work preserves compassion by enacting the end-of-life as a time of agency, a liminal time between the past (life) and an undesirable and certain future (death) that shifts focus to here and now actions. Taking a Heideggerian approach to the lived experience of compassion, we understand the hospice as a world where different ways of being are implicated in practices organized through existential spatiality (being with the guest and being by the guest). We show how exposure to people in end-of-life affects the experience of time in compassion practices, allowing them to be experienced as kairos, involving sacredness and spiritual connectedness with others, and as chronos, allowing compassion-givers to restore their capacity by focusing on compassion tasks.