As an institution meant to care for older adults nearing the end of life, the long-term care home is, unavoidably, a place of death and dying. Yet death and dying are often kept in the shadows of long-term care, tucked into dark corners where the experiences of those who receive and deliver care remain largely unacknowledged, unexamined, and unquestioned. When the COVID-19 virus entered these homes, it did so like a kind of ghost, claiming the lives of older adults in ways that were unfamiliar, sudden, and deeply frightening. Healthcare aides were the first to encounter these ghosts and the strange, yet familiar, forms of death and dying they brought with them. In my encounters with healthcare aides, there was something unsettling in the way they spoke about death and dying – in the looks on their faces, the way the room seemed to cloud over and darken, and the way I found myself gripping my pen and leaning in. In undertaking philosophical hermeneutic research, I often thought about how I would interpret what healthcare aides told me about death and dying, and about the unexpected insights I might come to understand. What I did not anticipate, however, was how their accounts would make me look over my shoulder, question my surroundings, and even their testimony itself. It seemed there was a hiddenness of my topic: healthcare aides are a hidden workforce; death and dying is hidden in long-term, during both pandemic and non-pandemic times; residents were hidden from the outside world during times of visitor restrictions; and residents were hidden from others within the long-term care home when dying. In the years since the pandemic, this hiddenness persists. I have been invited to present my doctoral research in a serialization in the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics. In this editorial, I share how I came to present my philosophical hermeneutic research as a kind of story, a frightening one, and healthcare aides’ experiences as a haunting of long-term care.
Katherine Stelfox (Sun,) studied this question.