Death and Dying: Narrating the End of Life

In the previous chapter, we saw the effects of the cold indifference of bureaucratic systems on the sick and dying. Denied legitimacy, suffering was rendered invisible by health policies that justified their exclusion and created barriers to care. This chapter continues to explore the private life of HIV infection and AIDS-related illness and death, from the perspective of a biography of a single man. In the chapter I confront the difficulty of writing about the suffering of others and draw extensively from his unique framing of illness and dying as being consumed by a “machine”.