Relationship and process in long-term care: Older husband carers and COVID-19 in the Spanish Mediterranean

Abstract

This article focuses on showing the centrality of the dimensions of relationship and process in long-term care in the contexts of conjugality, aging, and disability in the Spanish Mediterranean. I consider the notions of relationship and process to be essential to understanding how daily care is culturally made when an older husband cares for his ill wife. To give importance to these elements is to approach the long journey of care, its variability and vulnerability in the encounter with the other, as well as the complex trajectories traced in terms of environments, resources, and social actors. The article will use the concept of “constellations of care” to illustrate the complexity of these relationships and processes involved in care. The article seeks to contrast an initial period of expanding care with a second period of fractured care due to COVID-19 distancing policies. In this ethnography, the pandemic has clarified that social care comprises dynamic processes and relationships that seek proximity and collectivization to maintain life.