In palliative care, time can be understood in two ways. Clock time – the hours and minutes measured in schedules and calendars, and temporality – how people experience their time. For those living with serious illnesses, time becomes both fragile and profound. Caregivers and families who walk alongside them may feel this too. As explored in Life and Death Matters’ recent blog, temporality can become even more important than clock time. It shapes how care is given, received, and remembered.

This blog invites readers to consider how integrating a palliative approach can help make room for what matters the most to the people with serious illnesses. Slowing down, easing suffering, deepening connection, and embracing the power of memory-making, ritual, and emotional closeness.

Why Time Can Feel Different in Serious Illness

Serious illnesses can change our sense of time – not just how it passes, but how it’s felt. Priorities shift. A single conversation, a shared laugh, or a gentle touch can matter most.

Time in illness often unfolds in two overlapping layers. There’s inner time shaped by the illness that can include waiting, recovering, and navigating care. There’s also outer time. It’s shaped by moments with others – loved ones and caregivers who walk alongside, but don’t live the illness themselves. Both layers matter.

Its pace can shift dramatically. For some, time speeds up in the rush of tests and decisions. For others, it slows becoming a suspended space where the present sharpens, and small acts of connection or closure take on lasting meaning.

The palliative approach invites us to stop counting time and start experiencing it – fully, intentionally, and with care.

Making the Most of Time in the Final Stages of Life

For PSWs, nurses, and families, presence can be one of the most powerful gifts we can offer. Here are a few gentle ways to slow down and create space for connection in the final stages of life:

• Sit quietly together. Hold a hand. Breathe side by side.
• Share music that brings comfort or joy.
• Read aloud from a favourite book or letter.
• Light a candle, play a beloved song, or invite quiet prayer when welcomed.
• Create comfort with soft lighting, familiar scents and textures, personal objects, and peaceful sounds.
• Honour emotional and spiritual needs with rituals, legacy projects, or cultural practices.
• Facilitate visits, calls, or video chats with loved ones.
• Notice the ordinary. Cherish a favourite meal shared, or the quiet stillness before sleep.

Legacy-Building, Storytelling, and Memory-Making

Legacy is not only what remains after death – it can be what’s created in shared moments and built together. In palliative care, storytelling and memory-making can matter. They can offer connection, comfort, and help build a long-lasting legacy.

Consider:

• Recording oral histories or writing letters to loved ones.
• Creating photo albums with captions that reflect meaning, not just moments.
• Sharing cherished recipes or planting a tree in someone’s honour.
• Making hand casts or memory boxes that hold symbolic items.

Legacy projects can connect generations, celebrate a person’s identity, and offer comfort long after the farewell.

Hospice and Palliative Care as a Path to Quality Time

In hospice and palliative care, comfort is more than a clinical goal – it’s a doorway to presence, peace, and meaningful connection. When pain, nausea, and anxiety are well-managed, people with serious illness can shift their focus from suffering to what truly matters: being with loved ones, sharing memories, and finding closure.

Using a palliative approach, clinicians assess the whole person – body, mind, and spirit – attending to:

• Physical comfort
• Emotional and spiritual distress
• The desire for connection and dignity at the end of life.

By easing both physical symptoms and emotional burdens, nurses, PSWs, and other healthcare team members can help families reclaim time. They might facilitate a final visit. They may support a quiet ritual. Or they simply ensure someone feels safe and seen. In doing so, they help create space for meaningful and quality time with loved ones in the final days.

Conclusion: Time is Precious – But How It’s Experienced is What Matters

In palliative care, we come to understand that time isn’t just something to measure – it can be felt and experienced in moments of connection, comfort, and presence. We have learnt how palliative care teams can help reclaim time by easing suffering, reducing stress, and creating space for what truly matters.

Whether you’re a caregiver, clinician, or educator, ask yourself: How do I help others live their time, not just track it?

Be present. Make space. Honour time.