“The clock is ticking”: (dis)orientations to ageing and end-of-life care in advanced capitalism and care directives

Abstract

This article engages Italian migrant experiences and enactments of futurity to problematize neoliberal anticipatory approaches to ageing and care. Stepping beyond the focus on atomized and agentic individuals and a singular imagined future defined by notions of advancement and progress, sistemazione (home, future, and security) offers ways of building alternative and relational futures within times and spaces of shared precarity. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Italian migrant families living in Adelaide, and a critical analysis of objects as “orienting devices,” to consider how a family heirloom, a 26-face handmade Italian clock made from the physical remnants of World War II, offers new ways of imagining care within spaces of ruin.

Introduction

Sociological analyses of the future are marked by intersecting crises of care, and a growing sense of futurelessness (Bazzani, 2023; Goldberg, 2021; Tutton, 2023; Urry, 2016). As this work conveys, the capitalist extraction of labor and resources from bodies, environments, and institutions has fractured and fragmented the infrastructures of care that are critical to our survival. An insidious neoliberalism seems to influence all domains of activity (Brown, 2015), depleting capacities for care and human flourishing in families, hospitals, and aged care facilities (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). In tandem with a deterioration of health care and social welfare, the individual, characterized as autonomous and responsible, is foregrounded as personally responsible for their health and their future (Small, 2023) in a strategic side-lining of structural problems that safeguards measures of austerity (Lynch, 2022; Vincent, 2023). In short, and as is well documented, these neoliberal logics undergird the systemic weakening of care infrastructure and its coupling with an individualized ethos—a moral imperative to age (and die) well (Aberdeen & Bye, 2013; Asquith, 2009).

Advance care directives (ACDs) are an exemplary illustration of future making in the context of neoliberal self-responsibilization. Designed to encourage adults to formally record their preferences for care in case of future incapacity, ACDs in Australia are supported by a national policy framework (Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council, 2011) that has shaped state legislation. In South Australia (the site for the present study), this has informed the “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) “Advance Care Directive Kit” (Government of South Australia, 2016) which instructs individuals to take responsibility for their own health by documenting care decisions and refusals of treatment in a legally binding form. Uptake of ACDs is low—only 14 percent of the Australian population is reported to have one (White et al., 2014)—and completion rates are higher in Anglo and English-speaking groups (Jeong et al., 2015). Although ACD completion rates are low at a population level, previous research has shown that documenting ACDs may be discordant with cultural and religious sensibilities or taboos around end-of-life decision making (Islam et al., 2023; Kwak & Haley, 2005; Nguyen et al., 2021), and revealed how take up of these legislative instruments intersects with classed, racialized, gendered, and geographic inequities, and requires access to (in-language) information and resources (Jeong et al., 2015; Searight & Gafford, 2005; Sinclair et al., 2014; Zivkovic, 2018).

While positioned as a way to promote and protect personal choice through the documentation of future care preferences and refusals of treatment, ACDs are also a means to mitigate the economic burden of an ageing population, reducing “over-treatment” and escalating healthcare costs at the end of life (Scott et al., 2013). By anticipating medical decisions, and declining treatment in advance, the individual can state their wishes and contribute to the health of the economy. Brown's (2015) incisive analysis of neoliberal capitalism underscores how market-driven priorities have come to manipulate every sphere and activity from managing one's health “to planning one's death.” The responsible individual is one who anticipates and controls their body, mitigating risks of illness and decline (Giddens, 1991). As social critiques of health promotion and policy in contexts of growing social disadvantage so clearly show, we are “from the cradle to the grave,” witnessing the mass individualization of structural issues (Collins et al., 2016). Deviation from the moralized healthy life or the “good death” has become a personal failure to take control of one's future by making the right decisions across the life course.

Social critiques of neoliberal capitalism and its characterization of individual responsibility have long destabilized its central pillars of “choice” and “control,” revealing the veneer of increased autonomy in an increasingly insecure and inequitable world (Bauman, 2007; Rosa, 2013) where “the good life” (or death) is always out of reach (Berlant, 2011). “Liquid times” of late modernity with its velocity of fiscal movements and increased precarity (Bauman, 2007), have dissolved the potential for secure futures, ensuring the acceleration of social and economic disparities. Narratives of self-responsibilization, however, erase these inequities, shoring up the structural forces that (re)produce limited opportunities to forecast the future in marginalized groups (Carter et al., 2021). Those who are most disadvantaged may experience the future less as an expanse of open horizons and more as a “shrinking possibility” (Appadurai, 2013).

In this paper our aims are twofold. First, we take these future oriented ACDs as a point of departure to extend critical analyses of neoliberalized care and second, but no less importantly, we seek to present the divergent narratives, materialities, and temporalities of caring that emerged in the homes and lives of older Italian migrants in Adelaide. Our paper thus extends the work of Sinclair et al. (2014) on advance care planning with Italian migrants in regional Australia, which highlighted the importance of relational approaches to care planning in the Italian diaspora, and it responds to their call for greater consideration of how migration histories shape end of life decision-making. Focusing, in particular, on the migration story of a Sicilian couple, we ask how their narrative might offer alternative futurities that depart from neoliberal individualized anticipatory approaches to ageing and care that presume we can control potential scenarios in advance, ahead of time. As bodies and the places they reside in show, futures are not simply determined by agentic individuals or neoliberal rationalities. Rather, they are lived, indeterminately, in precarious and ever contingent sets of relations (Tsing, 2015).

Indeed, research on anticipatory forms of decision-making with structurally minoritized migrant groups points to the limited capacity to plan ahead from present situations of precarity (Zivkovic 2018), and to how the shifting of responsibility from society to the individual may overlook familial and collective modes of decision-making and care (Nguyen et al., 2021; Sinclair et al., 2014). Calling into question the DIY emphasis in ACDs, researchers in this field illustrate the barriers built into these legislative instruments (Nguyen et al., 2021; Pandos & Richards, 2022), highlighting the need for community and family assistance to negotiate documents and navigate exclusionary bureaucracies, languages, and institutions. As critical care scholars argue (Chatzidakis et al. 2020, p. 17), when social security dissolves and care deficits widen, communities and families are “often encouraged to step in as society's preferred infrastructure of care.” In migrant contexts, “care fixes” abound (Dowling, 2022) in the global movement of migrant (care) workers to Anglo-European societies where they temporarily remedy the disavowal of state responsibility and themselves experience reduced access to care (Coe, 2019). In turn, migrant workers, as with other disenfranchized populations, often depend on family members and community volunteers whose unpaid labor and helping hands fill the gaps in social welfare and health care (Schilliger et al., 2023).

Shifting from these social and political critiques of care in relation to migration, we think beyond the immediacies of present care needs and the documentation of future or advance plans. Instead, we seek to foreground the varied, and at times, contested temporalities that emerged in participants’ homes and lives, and which contoured potentialities for the shape of care. We attend to the tensions between post-war pasts and building secure futures, the embodied decline of ageing and the temporal accelerations of neoliberal lives, sensibilities of “tradition” and “modernity”, and the desynchronization between time as it is lived and the time of clocks and calendars. In contrast to scholarship that maintains divisions between lived and clock time (Elias, 1992; Flaherty, 1993), we explore how clocks and bodies may, together, produce versions of the future through embodied measures of time.

Theoretical directions and orienting devices

This article extends a feminist and critical care lens to the spatio-temporalities of migrant ageing among older Italians in Australia. Sociological studies of migration have attended to migrant experiences of marginalization and exclusion as a spatial displacement from home while being “out of place” in the so-perceived “host” country (Sayad, 2018). This “double absence,” or insecurity of non-being can, and often does, escalate as migrants age and approach the latter years of their lives and care needs intensify (Baldassar & Merla, 2013). In attending to dislocation and displacement, we extend spatialities to examine the temporal strategies embodied and emplaced by Italian participants to secure their futures. ¹ Of central importance in our analysis is the enactment of sistemarsi, a social and moral imperative to build a future, to settle down, and to generate ontological and intergenerational security through the home.

Conceptually, we draw on Ahmed's (2006, p. 10) exploration of “migrant orientations” as not only the “lived experience of facing at least two directions: toward a home that has been lost, and to a place that is not yet home,” but as residing beyond migrant bodies to the objects that direct—or orient—them. In this vein, we think with the notion of direction as an orientation, following it from our project and research focus on advance directives and Italian migrants’ understandings of them, to the “orientation devices” (Ahmed, 2006) that participants engaged to redirect their lives and bodies, creating new futures in the face of precarity. After a description of the study, we offer a vignette to orient the reader to the fieldsite and to how the complexities of future planning in relation to ageing alerted us to other ways of future making, and inhabiting time. We then follow Ahmed's (2006) investigation into how bodies and objects are oriented in space, pointing to the shifting temporal coordinates of participants’ bodies; their situatedness in multiple times and spaces. To do this, we take a particular domestic object and family heirloom—a 26-face Italian clock made from historical remnants of war—as an “orienting” device to rethink and unsettle assumptions about time, place, and care. Centrally located inside the home of a participating Italian family, and a narrative thread in their story of living and ageing in Australia, the clock literally and figuratively maintained Italian temporalities and traditions, and it revealed to us the multiple times and spaces inhabited by migrant families as they move through the life course, and from one place to another. We then attend to the practice of striving to “keep time,” even when “times have changed,” conceptualizing the ongoing daily labor to maintain the clock, and also homes, gardens, and bodies, as a way of future making that simultaneously preserves cultural sensibilities of sistemarsi across generations. Drawing on intergenerational narratives, we demonstrate the tensions and discordances that can arise as ageing parents seek to uphold the rhythms of Italian domestic life, while their adult children experience the affective pull from an acceleration of time (Rosa, 2013). Under the conditions of advanced capitalism and competing social and economic priorities, care is being squeezed out of family life with adult children frequently too busy to care for their parents. But, as we will show, time may be culturally and strategically reconfigured and potentially deaccelerated to enable possibilities for care. In so doing, we offer a provocation to Brown's (2015) thesis on the ubiquity of neoliberal rationalities to show how they might not always be totalizing and are enacted alongside—and in tension with—other rationalities.

The study

The research on which this article is based comprises part of a larger study examining understandings and responses to ACDs in and across diverse minoritized communities in South Australia. ² In this article we focus on research conducted in Adelaide with Italian migrants, which had been designed to ascertain their views on making and documenting advance plans for ageing and the end of life. Following an initial focus group in September 2021 with 15 older Italians (14 women and 1 man, aged from their 60s–90s) from varied regions in the North and South of Italy, participant observation and ethnographic interviews were undertaken in community centers and family homes between May and December 2022. Interviews were conducted with six participants, three women and three men (four first-generation and two second-generation migrants). The median age of first-generation participants was 80 years and they migrated to Adelaide between 1952 and 1972, while the median age of second-generation participants was 55. The families of interview participants originated from cities of South Italy, Agrigento, Catania and Messina (Sicily) and Reggio Calabria and Cosenza (Calabria). Linguistically, first-generation participants were mainly dialectophone, speaking either a regional dialect (i.e., Sicilian or Calabrian) or a quasi-regionalized variety of the standard national language, known as Italiano popolare (Marino, 2020c), based on their regional mother tongue. The participants of the second generation replied orally to the research interviews in English, with some expression in Calabrian or Sicilian dialect.

To conduct the research, Simone situated himself as both a researcher and an immigrant himself, a paesano (fellow countryman) and a folkloric musician of Italian music. Born in Rome, with a family originating from Calabria, Simone speaks Southern Italian dialects and is familiar with the grammar(s) and sensibilities of post-war emigration from South Italy and migration dynamics to Australia. Both authors are trained social anthropologists, and have experience working with migrant families and communities on projects relating to ageing and end-of-life decision-making. Simone brought with him more than 12 years of working with Italian migrant families living in Adelaide, and research participants in this study were recruited through his longstanding networks and local community leaders who held an advisory role on the project. As such, Simone conducted all ethnographic interviews, spending time with participants in their homes and gardens to gain an understanding of everyday domestic spaces and what was important for families as older members approach their later years. As reported by other anthropologists working with Italian households (Baldassar & Gabaccia, 2011; James, 2014; Marino & Chiro, 2014), interviews usually took place in and around gastronomic encounters. Mealtimes or café breaks were often invitations to the researcher to relive South Italian culinary hospitality through the sharing of carefully sliced pink flesh of prickly pears on a summer day, or exquisite freshly baked Sicilian almond biscotti, or the scent of fresh basil, oregano, and other widely used seasonal herbs. At other times, interviews preceded jam sessions where participants invited Simone to suonare insieme or play music, traditional Italian folk songs, together. It was in following these rhythms and making time for sensuous scholarship (Stoller, 1997), that we became oriented to the multiple times and places inhabited and embodied by older Italians living in the Adelaide suburbs.

Initial transcription, translation and analysis involved Otter and MAXQDA transcription and coding software, however since these programs were unable to capture the linguistic nuances of regional dialects or the complexities of Italian grammar(s) relating to care, migration, and the future, Simone reverted to manual methods of transcription, coding and thematic analysis. Excerpts of transcripts were read, and thematic coding was crosschecked with Tanya, and both researchers qualitatively analyzed the data through key stages of familiarization, using social theory in identifying a thematic framework, indexing, mapping, and interpretation (Ezzy, 2002). Time and the future emerged as dominant themes in the research. In many households these temporalities were intimately entwined with concerns about how, when, and where care would be provided into the future as older family members aged. While we draw on the narratives of first-generation and second-generation Italian participants in this paper, we focus primarily on the story of Marisa and Ilario, ³ a Sicilian couple aged in their 80s, for whom similar concerns prevailed. In their account, conversations about ageing, care, and the future were interwoven with events and traumas of their pasts, pivoting around and materializing in their home and its contents, in particular a handmade grandfather clock. This family heirloom marked the spatio-temporalities of their day-to-day lives and, as the next sections will show, oriented us to new directions in our research, and alternative imaginings of the future.

Temporal reorientations

We turn here to an ethnographic vignette to introduce the fieldsite and to foreground the ways we as researchers were oriented, and reoriented, in this project. On a summer's morning, we arrived at a community group located in a church hall in the southwestern suburbs of Adelaide, an area populated by Italian migrant families and home to Italian-owned delicatessens selling small goods and Italian sweets. At the invitation of two community leaders, well-respected second-generation women, we met with a group of senior women who emigrated from Italy's Southern regions, many with their parents, to escape the social and economic deprivations of post-war Europe, and build a more secure future for their families in Australia. For more than 20 years, these women had gathered together around Italian coffee, cakes and biscotti, to socialize and to support one another through an informal collective of care. With long-established relations of trust in the group, both across and between members and the community leaders, we were encouraged to meet with group members, and to invite their views on ageing and approaching the later stages of life in Australia. After positioning ourselves as social researchers with experience working on projects related to ageing and health in migrant populations, we were offered glimpses into their everyday lifeworlds of ageing and care at the end of life.

Women narrated the changing ways of care they had encountered over time and from one country to another. They spoke of the increasingly limited options available for the provision and receipt of care in Australia. The busy work lives of children, increasingly saddled with the debt of expensive mortgages and childcare costs, limited the time and resources available to care. In-home care provided by one's own children was out of sync with “modern life.” Sitting around the table, cups of coffee at hand, some bemoaned the growing numbers of older Italians being uprooted from their homes and entering into aged care facilities, a situation that was “not a choice,” but rather something that happened to older Italians when there were no alternatives available. Leaving the family home to enter institutionalized aged care, as other researchers on ageing in Italian contexts have shown, was to be avoided at all costs (Rugolotto et al., 2017). In Italy, by contrast, there were other ways of “fixing” care deficits (Dowling, 2022). While care could be more readily performed within the home for those who could afford it through the cheap labor of migrant women, often through informal arrangements, immigration restrictions preclude such models of care in Australia. As one older widow declared, in Italy this allowed people to “remain at home” when they are old and frail, and this was considered by her and others around the table as a better option. But, they lamented, it was not an opportunity available to them or to others who age in Australia. Outside of these transnational care networks, and the racialized and gendered inequities they enable (Schilliger et al., 2023), older Italian women in Australia experienced a foreclosing of care options in Australia. The erosion of possibilities for care stood in stark contrast to the neoliberal rhetoric of choice embedded in ACDs, and the moral imperative to take personal responsibility and control of one's future health and situation.

The value placed on ageing at home was a recurrent thread through this project and, as we came to learn, it was an extension of the Italian sensibility of sistemarsi, to “settle down,” to secure a future for one's family in Australia (Baldassar, 1997; Pulvirenti, 2000). As the gathering drew to a close, we were urged by Marisa, a Sicilian woman in her 80s, along with several other women including both community leaders who run the group, to visit Marisa's house. A skilled carer, having looked after her mother with dementia until she passed away, Marisa and her husband, Ilario, unlike other participants whom we interviewed in the project, had written an ACD. Given our research focus on how migrant Italians think about and plan for the future, Marisa made it clear that their house and its contents had much to contribute, and she eagerly led the way to her place from the passenger seat of Simone's car.

After being guided through the paved pathway of heavily manicured flower beds and the columns and arches that define the façade of their home, Marisa showed us to the front door where Ilario excitedly welcomed us. We were immediately greeted by an imposing timepiece: a glistening stainless steel 2.6 meter clock with 26 faces handmade by Ilario's great uncle from the metal scraps and war relics from World War II that he found in the aftermath in his decimated Sicilian village. Ushering us through their tiled corridor closer toward this extraordinary device, Ilario and Marisa explained with great pride the painstaking work that went into its production. In war-torn Sicily, over the course of a decade, Ilario's uncle collected the wreckage from the perilous conflict; remnants were pieced together day by day, year by year. It was impossible to not be awestruck by this clock; however, we did not yet understand its centrality to our project, or to Ilario and Marisa's orientation to the future. But, as the following sections will show, we came to learn from the relational temporalities in their home in ways that troubled depictions of agentic, atomized individuals that can chart a certain future, or advance a particular care directive.

Seeking secure futures

A few weeks later, after this introduction to the impressive family heirloom, Simone revisited Ilario and Marisa to garner their views on planning for ageing and the end of life. Again, the clock came to the fore. We had sought to learn more about their decision-making for the future in relation to ACDs, but Ilario and Marisa had little to say about these formal plans for future care. Their responses to questions about medical preferences, or why they (in contrast to other participants) wrote an ACD, were short. Marisa told us, “yes we have that [an ACD].” When pressed, Ilario emphasized his preference to age and “die at home” and Marisa added, “I don’t want to be attached to machines.” Both agreed that they would not want their lives prolonged if they were not “self-sufficient.” Although they were not opposed to discussing these sensitive topics, ACDs drew them from the things they wished to say and show us, and they failed to capture Italian sensibilities of the future. So, following their direction, we turned from our interview questions to face the commanding clock and the temporal and spatial coordinates that undergird their lives. As we came to learn, Ilario and Marisa held in tension rationalities of independence and autonomy with alternative and relational futurities that depart from neoliberal approaches. Inseparable from migration trajectories of war and displacement, future planning took shape not only in ACDs or an individual imperative to age well, but in the familial inheritance of the clock and the security forged in and beyond the bricks and mortar of their home. We turn now to these temporal directions—of war-torn pasts and future imaginings—and to how they were situated in displaced bodies, objects, and biographies.

Born in Agrigento, Sicily, during World War II, Ilario's childhood unfolded in a landscape of death and desolation. The bombing of his village reduced agrarian life to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people were left poor and homeless at a time when the cost of living rose sharply with money and food in short supply. Amid this carnage, Ilario's uncle gathered discarded grenades, and the pieces of brass and steel left in the fields by American troops. Each fragment was transformed and pieced together using only the simplest of tools—a hammer, an anvil, a hand-drill, some files, and a compass. A petrol drum was used for the main clock face. Smaller surrounding clock faces displayed other locales and times, each an hour apart, etched with metal names from Roma to Sydney, London, Bombay, and Leningrad, all made from grenade casings. With the design sketches in hand, Ilario explained that his uncle did not have watchmaker training, but descending from a line of blacksmiths and metal workers he spent a decade transforming the ruins of war into the magnificent 200-kilogram centerpiece of their home.

The end of the war offered little economic relief. Ilario and Marisa's narratives, as with other participants, spoke to the painfully slow post-war recovery. Daily life was marked by hunger and a lack of facilities including sanitary arrangements and running water. Historians have described la questione meridionale (Meridional question) (Gramsci, 1975), or the cycles of geopolitical North/South division, inequity, and exploitation that escalated in this period (Ginsborg, 1990). With the absence of State institutions in the South, widespread corruption ensued, and peasant families were often unable to return to agrarian lifestyles or gain a foothold in the shift towards capitalism that increased financial security for urban and wealthier families concentrated in cities in the North (Pulvirenti, 2000). The uneven terrain of reconstruction hit village families in the South the hardest. After the war and from a young child, Ilario worked alongside his father and uncles in his grandfather's foundry, taming and shaping metals over long days of dangerous backbreaking work. Exploited and exhausted with fatigue, they worked tirelessly in the heat and ash, “blackened by the smoke from the furnace.” Ilario recalled how his relatives aged prematurely in exchange for an income insufficient to feed and support a family, or even to buy soap—“the money was never enough.” He showed Simone photographs of his once highly populated village, explaining that after the war “there was no work and young men were forced to leave the village,” migrating to the North of the country, or to the United States, Canada or Australia. At this time, the exclusionary “White Australia” policy had opened up to non-British migrants allowing the inclusion of European families to overcome labor shortages and boost population growth. With no stable economic future, Ilario, at the age of 21, emigrated in search of the promise of security abroad—a job and homeownership—the Great Australian Dream.

The history of Australian immigration restrictions is also a history of affordances to the British who arrived via assisted passage in a racialized project that extended opportunities to Anglo bodies but failed to make room for others (Hage, 1998). Ahmed (2006) explores the “arrival” of migrant bodies as bodies that do not fit, that are out of alignment. Bodies that are out of place where they have not been given a place (Ahmed, 2006). Ilario's story hints at these exclusions and “estrangements” (Ahmed, 1999), and he speaks to the experience of being spaesato, literally meaning “being out of one's town,” the condition of being displaced (Marino, 2019). As “Australians did not like us” he felt safer among local Italian social networks, who assisted him in finding gardening work and a shared house with paesano or “fellow countrymen.” They formed a community that gathered to play cards and music at Italian homes, parties, and weddings where Ilario courted and serenaded his Sicilian wife, Marisa, before building their life together, buying a small house and raising three children.

But as migrant orientations are multidirectional (Ahmed, 2006), Ilario and Marisa found themselves pushed and pulled in different directions. Forged in racialized exclusions long before migrant families seek to lay down roots, “host” countries can fail to accommodate bodies that are “foreign” (Ahmed, 2006), inhibiting the existential imperative of being at home in the world (Jackson, 1995). Imbued with emotional longing and the guilt of having left one's country and family (Baldassar, 2015; Marino, 2020a; Sayad, 2018), these orientations also present levers pulled by ageing parents in need of care and security. When requested to return home by his father, Ilario quit his job and sold his house, returning to Sicily with his young family to a village that was “poorer and emptier than before” where “there was no work,” and the promise of a job failed to materialize. The small parcel of land they secured could not sustain their future, and villagers labeled them pejoratively, as foreigners. Unable to find their footing or make a future for themselves, they were again spaesati. In the ruins of failed post-war recovery, Ilario found solace in the clock he “grew up with;” it “brought back memories” and, being made from remnants of war, it offered hope for survival, even a better future. But as time ticked on, Ilario and Marisa remained out of work and were unable to provide security for their children. After six months the family returned to Australia, found jobs, and with their double income bought land and saved for a new house.

Owning your own home is a core value and aspiration in the story of Italian migration to Australia, and the pattern of high rates of home ownership among post-war migrants from Italy has been evident since the 1970s (Pulvirenti, 2000). Housing can offer ontological security in the process of resettlement (Due et al., 2022; Marino 2020b) and, for Italian migrants, owning a home is more than the shelter provided by a roof over one's head, it is a “process of achieving sistemazione—settlement, a place, a future” (Baldassar, 1997; Pulvirenti, 2000). It is a marker of achievement and the standard against which to measure the success of migration (Marino, 2020c). Having arrived at sistemazione in spaces where bodies are spaesati (out of place) is hard work (c.f. Ahmed, 2006, p. 62). And in the vocabulary and sensibilities of post-war migrant families, home ownership became the materialization of sacrifices made with their lives and bodies (Pulvirenti, 2000).

Sistemazione, however, is more than bricks and mortar. It also takes shape in the things we find in Italian homes and those homes take the shape of the objects they contain. Ilario explained that when his uncle died, they had “saved up all the necessary money” to build a large house, but the family in Sicily sought to sell the clock to a private buyer. Sistemazione was in reach, yet Ilario could not settle. Preoccupied with the clock, he could not sleep. He grew increasingly obsessed with his uncle's achievement of gathering material strewn over fields and streets during the war, the assemblage of parts, piece by piece, filed with precision over ten long years. Resolute that the clock must remain with the family, he arranged for its shipment to Australia, a logistical feat which took more than five years and considerable expense. Eventually, the entrance to their home was designed around the clock with the ceiling height customized to accommodate its lofty stature. Beaming with pride as he looked at the clock, he exclaimed “here it is, after more than 60 years it's still here, in my house.” The colossal clock, like the property in which it is housed, embodies sistemazione, the struggle and sacrifice of post-war migration to Australia, securing their own and their children's futures in intergenerational wealth that could be passed down the line (Baldassar, 1997). This is a relational futurity; it eschews mythologies of independence and separation. However, being built from conditions of precarity, sistemazione, as the next section will show, can be threatened. Displacement may reoccur and seemingly secure futures can be uprooted, amplified by temporal disorientations, and the sense that time is speeding up as lives and capacities to care reach their limits.

Tensions and temporalities of care

Over short black coffees prepared with caffettiera (Italian moka), and home-baked Sicilian almond biscotti, the conversation turned to Ilario and Marisa's preferences for how and where they would like to age in the future. Surrounded by the well-kept garden they had nurtured “from nothing,” Marisa exclaimed, “as long as we are well, we want to stay here. This is our home, it is great.” Pear, apricot, fig, and olive trees dot their suburban landscape, along with vegetable plots of fresh seasonal produce. Hens in the chicken coop produce an abundant supply of eggs. Their expansive garden provides a steady source of ingredients for everyday meals, and the passata, jams, traditional torte and almond biscotti that are the mainstay of Italian culinary provisions. At Christmas time, Marisa makes Sicilian sweets with fig jam, seed cookies, cannoli, and sweet fried dough in different shapes, including pignolata with honey, a typical recipe prepared also for Carnival. At Easter, she bakes i cudduri cu l’ova, a traditional dessert adorned with decorated hard-boiled eggs. Depending on the season, these Sicilian delights occupy the fridge and line the pantry shelves in a well-equipped immaculate kitchen where all surfaces, from floor tiles to everyday appliances, sparkle and shine. So too does the clock. Regularly cleaned with fine sandpaper to keep the sheen of its recycled metal, the clock sets the rhythms of their daily lives and calendars. Wound every 16 h, Ilario can maintain the time of all 26 dials, and the 26th face at the back is used to adjust the time if needed. In keeping calendrical and clock time, the main face also displays the day, week, and month—when months are not 30 days, the difference must be corrected manually.

Keeping time involves work. And maintaining the clock, like the property and their ageing bodies, requires assistance. Ilario and Marisa, aged 88 and 83, receive support from the Australian Government My Aged Care scheme for in-home gardening and cleaning, since they can no longer tend to these domestic chores on their own. Ilario has osteoarthritis and respiratory illness, and care workers visit to provide him with the oxygen required to breathe. Reflecting on how the body changes over time and with age, Ilario says “I am not the same as I used to be, I was strong, I was able to turn the world.” Nowadays, his sons climb the step ladder to polish the clock. He can no longer lift heavy things, and he becomes breathless, requiring an afternoon nap to get through the day. Marisa's bodily capacities have also declined. So too has her memory, as she acknowledged, “you know, I often forget things, maybe I go into a room, and I don’t remember why.” Ilario and Marisa agreed that domestic labor and care work for ageing parents, particularly in South Italian families, had traditionally been enacted by adult children but, they conceded, “times have changed.” In the gendered dynamics of care that prevail in and beyond Italian households, Marisa explained that they have three children, all sons, and no daughters. Married to Australian women who are unaccustomed to Italian traditions of family care, her sons are “too busy” with their own families, jobs, and commitments, to undertake the care work that Marisa performed for her ageing mother. “I did my duty,” she explained, “but it was tough.” Her immobile mother had dementia and Marisa became ill from the emotional and physical labor that care work demands. She told us that these care duties could not be accommodated in the busy working lives of her sons and daughters-in-law because “they don’t have time” and “times are different now:”

Of course, it would be nice to stay in our house forever, but if it's not possible, I don’t want to disturb our sons and daughters-in-law, it's not fair. If tomorrow it is necessary, we will go to the home for the elderly.

As Marisa and Ilario's bodies slowed down and capacities reduced, their adult children appeared to them to live in worlds that are “more modern,” “faster,” and which no longer offer affordances to make time for ageing parents. Other participants also spoke about the “busyness” of their children's working lives, their time increasingly compressed, out of rhythm with “the old ways” such as caring for the elderly or attending church. Interviews with second-generation Italian migrants similarly spoke to the temporal tensions of making time for ageing parents when other commitments—to their jobs and to their own children and grandchildren—reduce capacity to care. Maria, a mother aged in her mid-50s, told us that her parents and others in their generation tended to be more “traditional,” and this entailed the view that they should remain in their own home “because they have worked so hard and for so long” to achieve this security. But these preferences for in-home care are increasingly difficult to fulfill. Maria explained how “lifestyles, job commitments, family commitments” impinge on the time available to care, saying “it doesn’t allow the opportunity to look after elderly parents.” Yet, despite competing work and care priorities, Maria planned to “honor” her parents’ wish having promised them “I will do everything in my power to look after you at home.”

Tensions around the times and places of care permeated gender divides among our participants. For example, another interviewee, Rick, a middle-aged second-generation Italian man felt that it was a laudable act of sacrifice and devotion to care for ageing parents, one that he hoped to perform, because it would enable his parents to “feel secure.” Yet, he conceded that this is often discordant with contemporary working lives:

Italian Australians would like to stay forever in their own home, where there are all the memories and their life. But unfortunately … family members do not always have the opportunity to do so because they live far away or they work.

These narratives conveyed the lack of capacity to care for the aged in the daily grind of working families when time is stretched by the conditions of modern working lives. Under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism, as Chatzidakis and colleagues argue, parents “barely have time to provide for the essential needs of their dependants, let alone to pay heed to the situation of others” (Chatzidakis et al., 2020, p. 28). In the “escalatory logics” of advanced capitalism, the clock is ticking, and we must run always faster “just to stay in place” (Rosa, 2010, p. 28). At the time of our interviews a cost-of-living crisis loomed, amplified by a double burden of rising inflation and interest rates. With many families forced into patterns of working more, care is increasingly outsourced to those at the bottom rung of the labor hierarchy (Chatzidakis et al., 2020). In turn, ageing bodies are moved from their own homes into the residential facilities of aged care providers.

Such forms of care were often contested by our participants who held in tension their jobs, family responsibilities, and a familial commitment to honor and reciprocate sacrifices made by parents to ensure their security into the future. Undergirding these sensibilities was an implicit knowledge that this relocation is unsettling—not only because it involves leaving the family home and moving into an aged care facility but because it undoes the achievement of sistemazione, the secure futures that post-war migrant parents had built. For Ilario, the shift to residential aged care, which frequently involves the sale of the family home, reflected “modern” ways of (de)valuing the family, Italian values of intergenerational security, and the position of the elderly. It was not in agreement with sistemazione and the traditions of Italian domestic life. Unlike Marisa, who he reasoned was herself “more modern,” Ilario explained he is “old fashioned” and viewed aged care as an ultimate act of inhumanity—“to go alone out of the house, like dogs.” Ilario was steadfast. He wanted to remain at home “finu a quandu non di chiama u Signuri [until the Lord calls],” explaining that “the house is big, the children can stay here, there is so much room.” Indeed, their children, like other second-generation participants, seemed to internalize this intergenerational contract of care. “They are good children” Ilario emphasized, adding that they had, despite busy lives and schedules, promised to “never send us away from our home to put us in a retirement home, we do not deserve it, after what we have done, it would be a real shame.” With his eyes cast over the home they had created, he exclaimed, “this is our house, we built it many years ago, the children grew up here, there are all our memories, our history.” Turning to the impressive timepiece, he said, “you see that big clock? It weighs more than 200 kilos. I bought it from Italy. It is a memory of my family. I would never part [from it]. We must stay where our history is.”

Futures, however, are uncertain and ambiguities emerge in the tension between Ilario's dreams of intergenerational care for himself and for the clock and neoliberal rationalities that endorse the movement of aged bodies into care facilities when they are no longer self-sufficient. While he communicated that he would not leave his home and that the clock would “surely remain in the family,” he also spoke bitterly of how, against his will, he “probably will not spend his remaining days in ‘la casa di famiglia’” and how his three children, busy with their independent lives, jobs and families “cannot divide it [and will] most likely sell [the clock].” In Ilario's narrative there is no clear or certain path ahead. Will his dreams of intergenerational care founder on the socioeconomic conditions of contemporary Australian life? Will his home and clock be sold? As he and Marisa age, will they be able to remain at home “where [their] history is”? These questions reflect complex entanglements of past, present and future materialities and circumstances, and they cannot be solved or resolved ahead of time by any formulaic legal document that prioritizes an abstract future that is yet to come.

In the home, by contrast, the past and the future are not abstract concepts. They are tangible—embodied, emplaced, and entwined. And, in the legacy of the beautiful timepiece made from the relics of war there remains space for hope, for intergenerational care and continuities, amid indeterminant and precarious futures. Maintaining the heirloom, and calendrical and clock time, shapes the rhythm and tenor of Ilario's life and he hopes it will, through inheritance, shape the temporal orientation of his children's lives too. The clock offers a touchstone to the past, to their Sicilian heritage, and it affords daily opportunities to maintain temporal order into the future in an increasingly fast paced and atomized era. In a daily practice of maintaining the grandfather clock, Ilario diverges from the speed and busyness of “modern life.” Keeping time by manually winding the clock every 16 h, he upholds the stability of clock time, resisting what Rosa (2013) in his critique of capitalism characterized as a period of acceleration. In Rosa's (2013) theorization, the technologies that enable increasingly rapid flows of capital, data, and knowledge produce the sense that the present is shrinking. There is a speeding up of lives as families juggle escalating demands of work and raising their children amid the dismantling of public institutions. Defined by logics of “progress” and acceleration, capitalism produces time pressures; things move fast, there are no longer intervals between actions, no time to pause as the social order can only reproduce itself through growth.

This quality of acceleration or what Rosa (2013) terms “dynamic stabilization” is a systemic necessity, an indispensable feature of capitalism. But not all spheres of social life can move at the same pace. Since speed is uneven, the world cannot be uniformly sped up; nature cannot be mined for progress perpetually (Rosa, 2017). It is a finite resource. Nor can bodies speed up indefinitely. They have their limits. They age and decline. There is a “desynchronization” (Rosa, 2017) between capitalist temporalities and (ageing) bodies. Advance care directives may offer the promise of ameliorating temporal differentials—enabling a projection to the future through anticipatory decision-making, but in Ilario and Marisa's house other temporal dynamics and possibilities were enacted and on display. The upkeep of the clock, and the home and garden, is a “resynchronizing measure” (Fuchs, 2005); it recalibrates seemingly discordant temporalities of embodied and clock time, and tradition and modernity. Living and breathing the “old ways,” maintaining the clock is a way of slowing down the accelerations of “modern life” that threaten Ilario's security. It is a cultural and temporal strategy to reinstate steady routinized intervals of time, and thus produce deaccelerated futures that make space for intergenerational care.

Conclusion

What are the possibilities for imagining care futures in this present time? What do Ilario and Marisa, and their Sicilian clock made from the wreckage of war, tell us about migrant ageing in Australia? Projections to the future by way of making ACDs are uncommon. And in having completed ACDs, Ilario and Marisa were outliers in this study. They were not representative of Italians in Australia or the broader population's ways of advancing plans for ageing and the end of life (Jeong et al., 2015). Nor did they foreground ACDs in our engagements with them, even when directly asked. Despite the seeming ubiquity of neoliberal rationalities and claims that they govern every domain and dimension of human existence (Brown, 2015), Ilario and Marisa's domestic sphere revealed that they are not a totalizing force. In having an ACD Ilario and Marisa appeared to enact neoliberal rationalities of self-responsibilization for health and ageing, but this was held together, and in tension, with other grammars and sensibilities of care and futurity. As our paper has shown, ACDs did not have the same resonance with ways of future making that occurred much closer to home, in the built materiality of the family house, its garden and contents, the things through which Italian migrants seek to achieve sistemazione despite indeterminate futures.

Deriving from the Latin abante, meaning in front, advance is a verb connoting a forward movement in time. It too is a noun that depicts being ahead in terms of progress, development, or age. Interwoven with histories of empire and colonization, and wielded for capitalist ends, tropes of progress and advancement have been legitimized as the single path to the future (Tsing, 2015). This particular forward trajectory assumes distinct capacities and capabilities to choose and control a specific direction—one that prioritizes and benefits the individual (or certain individuals)—overlooking the need for collective care in the face of mutual vulnerabilities, instability, and indeterminacy. We might ask, if in planning and looking ahead a blinkered perception has pervaded our thinking and actions, disavowing other possibilities for future making (Tsing, 2015). In her ethnography on the matsutake mushroom, Tsing offers a provocation to this limited version of futurity, producing alternative narratives for imagining collaborative survival within spaces of human-induced crisis and catastrophe. The first living thing to appear after the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, matsutake live in damaged landscapes through reciprocity with other species. It may seem like an imaginative leap to compare mushrooms with clocks, but like the matsutake that emerged in “blasted landscapes,” the timepiece, made from the ruins of war, has allowed us to think through the precarious and contingent sets of relations from which lives (and homes) are built. Ilario and Marisa invited us to turn from ACDs to face another direction, to look differently at how futures may be made, and unmade. To look, not forward, but around (Tsing, 2015), and in doing so, we noticed the limits to sistemazione, advance directives and to capacities for care. However, migrant orientations also pointed to possibilities for remaking the future that is inherited (Povinelli, 2021; Tsing, 2015). How might policy and public conversations about planning for ageing and death (and after death) incorporate broader and more nuanced understandings of future making in ways that extend beyond neoliberal agendas of individual responsibilization? As the lives of post-war migrants show, futures may be made and unmade. It is in the ever-shifting rapids of ageing and uncertainty that Ilario awakes each day to wind the clock, to grasp a future that makes space for intergenerational care, and which, despite imaginings of sistemazione, is built on the inheritance of shared precarity.