`It's not like family going is it?': Negotiating friendship boundaries towards the end of life.

This paper considers the roles of friends, family and professionals in the community care of people with terminal illnesses. It highlights a trend in informal social relationships in the palliative care domain. Where relationships were once premised on a generalized sense of duty and obligation, they are now more complex and open to individual negotiation. The paper suggests that rigid boundaries between different relationships leads to the possibility of the potential exclusion of one group by another. In the context of informal care, friends in particular may be excluded by professionals and/or family members, a process of 'disenfranchisement'. Secondary analysis is presented from Cartwright and Seale's retrospective survey of bereavement which focused on the nearest person at the time of death. The data presented in this paper are taken from responses to open questions in semi-structured interviews. The focus is on 67 respondents who identified themselves as 'close friend' or 'friend/neighbour'. The paper argues that friends and neighbours provide a small but significant source of support for dying people in the community. However, there are boundaries to friendship which are constantly being negotiated in the face of changing social norms and expectations of family members and professionals. These friendship negotiations can involve self-recrimination and/or justification, leaving caring friends with complex and sometimes unrecognized grieving processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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