Living at the End of One’s Life

Palliative care questions both health professionals and patients with the challenge to help the sick person to live as well as possible until death. One of the conditions is to encourage the expression of what the person is experiencing. This paper introduces a humanistic psychology tool with the purpose to encourage the verbalization of experience by using the metaphor of the tree. Identifying with the tree, the person may then relate their situation in terms of analogy, and talk about death in relation to their life trajectory. After a presentation of the “Test of the three trees” and the analysis procedure, two cases are presented. These cases illustrate the validity of the subjective analogical discourse used to talk about death and about the opportunities occurring at the end of one’s life.