Where the Willow Don't Bend: A Phenomenological Perspective on Healing and Illness at the End of Life

I would like to consider the situation of the person who is terminally ill, the person whose death is, ontologically, her ownmost possibility and, factically, her immediate, inevitable future. The primary aim of this paper is to argue that the terminally ill patient can, in fact, experience healing at the end of her life and in the face of impending death. I will not argue that the possibility of experiencing healing at the end of life means leaving room for divine intervention, though neither do I intend to preclude such a possibility. Rather, I will argue that healing is something that we experience quite apart from what happens to our biological make-up. While healing is often correlated with a change in the state of our bodies, it need not be.