Most clinicians prefer that patients plan for their future illness care before things become urgent or they lose the ability to make decisions. Completing an advance directive form by itself does not always impact future care decisions. Rather than focusing on hypothetical specific treatment decisions in the future or the completion of forms, conversations early in serious illness focusing on what matters most to patients may help guide care decisions over time and prepare patients and families for future conversations about specifics in real time when things do progress. The key is to plan on multiple small conversations over time. A roadmap for having these early goals of care discussion is PAUSE (Pause to make time for the conversation, Ask permission to discuss the topic and explain why, Uncover values first (don’t lead with code status), Suggest selecting a surrogate, Expect emotion/End). Some patients shy away from considering a future state when their disease has worsened, and are not interested in talking about what matters to them. Exploring why using a motivational approach and focusing on your relationship may help plant the seed and make future conversations easier.

Liminal spaces of waiting and expectation are at the centre of this chapter that focuses on Hamlet, Waiting for Godot and Beckett’s short story ‘Dante and the Lobster’. The chapter draws on Stephen Greenblatt’s study Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and on Daniela Caselli’s Beckett’s Dantes (2005), but it also takes the idea of purgatory to describe a dynamic, permeable space for intertextual dialogue. I argue that the texts of Beckett, Dante and Shakespeare do not appear as stable entities but rather are in flux and resonate with one another. Beckett’s recourse to purgatory is therefore not only the adaptation of a space for the imagination of medieval readers, but also a means of reflecting on the processes in which literary space is constructed. A main part of the chapter is devoted to the reading of ‘Dante and the Lobster‘ in dialogue with Hamlet and King Lear and also with the poetry of Thomas MacGreevy, from which many of its themes derive. ‘Dante and the Lobster’ and Hamlet converge on the notion of pause, and the chapter examines the ways in which both works become mutually interanimating in their reflections on dualisms, between human being and animal, Christ and the lobster, beginning and end, hesitation and rashness, fear and the embrace of death.

This chapter reveals the elaboration of a set of critical priorities, transition prime among them, crystallised by Aaron Hill in the 1730s. Offering what he claimed to be a purified version of pantomime’s techniques for arresting attention, Hill wrote of how actors could become a ‘true FAUSTUS’ for the theatres through transition, creating iconic and dynamic moments of suspension during which they could shift mind and body from one passion to another. Hill’s emphases continue into the time of David Garrick, whose transitions into ‘pensively preparatory attitudes’ were praised as intellectual achievements and blamed as pantomimical tricks. Ultimately, pauses and the transitions that occurred upon them became moments when an actor could be described as asserting their artistic autonomy and the focal point of critical attention. The realisation of Hill’s dreams — a theatre where sophisticated emotion replaced slapstick motion as the key source of spectacle — soon, however, risked becoming a Faustian pact, for an insight into the transitions of a play seemed to demand as much private attention to the page as public engagement with the stage.