Images of Spectral Relatedness: How Couples Anchor Life Together in a Nursing Home in Denmark

When one partner in a couple moves into a nursing home, the sense of shared everyday life and home is disturbed. In this article, we examine how couples respond to radical ruptures in their shared everyday lives, homes, and imagined futures when one partner moves into a nursing home due to severe illness. We draw on the field of imagistic anthropology that attends to the uncertain, ambiguous, and imaginative dimensions of life to capture the often overlooked, albeit important, dimensions of peoples’ lives in situations of uncertainty, rupture, and loss. Inspired by the concept of spectral kinship, we delve into experiences of transgressing space and time, the material and the immaterial, the “real,” the dreamed of and imagined as they are anchored in a play of imagination, a book, and a dream. We call these anchors of belonging. We suggest the concept spectral relatedness to highlight both mundane and spectral dimensions of homemaking and being together. We argue that attending to imagistic qualities in fraught life situations can help bring forth nuances and complexities of how couples face severe illness and the relational and practical changes such life situations entails in the context of homemaking in institutional settings.