Narratives in health research offer the subjects' point of view about their illness processes, contributing to the realization of a “first person” clinic, meeting the recommendations of palliative care, which emphasize an organization of care contemplating people in need. their biographies. This article presents analyzes of two narrative interviews conducted with João and Maria, hospitalized for palliative cancer treatment. The research aimed to understand the experience of illness and the perspective of death based on the existential phenomenological approach. Following the biographical method proposed by Sartre, a movement was made to dive into the individual trajectories and experiences of these participants, seeking an understanding of the psychic acquired inside their stories. In the analyzes, two stories were shown that point to the complexity of life, in a dialectical movement between sociomaterial conditions and subjective experiences, which allow reflecting on the entanglements and tensions that past, present and future engender in the lived. Is considered, then, that disease and death promote (re) formulations in the subjects' projects of being, but that these original projects are the background of the experiences of illness and death and the reinterpretations of the existential trajectory carried out in view of the imposition of finitude.