Silence at the end of life: Multivocality at the edges of narrative possibility

“If God wants her to get better, she will get better,” Nila said in a comforting way.1 We were in a major public hospital in the city of Banda Aceh, standing at the bedside of a young woman suffering from AIDS-related toxoplasmosis, and talking to the mother who nodded acquiescingly while gently rubbing her unconscious daughter's cold legs. Back in the hospital corridor, Nila whispered that it was extremely rare that anyone would recover from such a grave condition. Nila was one of the HIV-support-group workers with whom I conducted participant observation during my ethnographic fieldwork on HIV care in the Indonesian province of Aceh. Her soothing religious words were exemplary of a way of talking that characterized interactions and stories of end-of-life care. Rarely would caregivers directly refer to the end of life as nearby, or dying as a process one needed to start preparing for. Life and death, people in Islamic Aceh cautioned, are in God's hands, so one could never know with certainty whether the last phase of life had started.