Who are the people who look after you when you die? What happens when there isn’t anyone able or willing to arrange the funeral? These are some of the critical questions posed by Dr Sally Raudon, ESRC postdoctoral fellow, whose doctoral research focused on Hart Island, New York City, the largest public cemetery in the US. During COVID-19, it shocked the public when it became widely known as a massed grave for the unknown, unclaimed, and poor.
Beyond the pandemic, increasing death rates are a growing public health concern. More people in the UK are expected to die each year than in the previous year for the next 15 years. Life expectancy has increased in many societies, and this often means people will live their final years with complex health and care needs from long-term disease, pain, and frailty. These medical challenges can leave their finances drained – and bring changes that are both physical and social.
Loneliness, smaller families, exhausted relationships, and declines in marriage and cohabitation mean significant increases in people living, and dying, alone, and possibly needing help with funeral costs from local authorities or charities. Councils and funeral directors report increasing rates of families declining responsibility for the funeral – though this remains, in many cultures, a serious transgression of family obligation.
Dr Raudon had encountered a broad network of international researchers, practitioners and policymakers during her research, all grappling with the cumulative issue of the ‘lonely funeral’. There was a growing need to share complementary investigations, ideas, and connection. So, in April this year, she convened the ‘Lonely Funerals’ symposium, attracting scholars from the UK, US, Ireland, and the Netherlands, working across diverse fields of enquiry, from anthropology, sociology and philosophy, to cultural history, law and consumer research. Other attendees worked in funeral industry organisations and policy charities.
From multiple angles of research and practice, the group analysed the conditions that can lead to ‘lonely’ death, and the radical implications of lonely deaths for relations between the living and the dead. Cultural anthropologist Professor Anne Allison (Duke University) delivered the keynote on the changing sociality of death in Japan. Poet and journalist Joris van Casteren described how, following a lonely death in Amsterdam, a poet is appointed by the city to research the deceased. They compose a poem to be read at their funeral. Other examples included burial friendship clubs, direct cremations, charities that organise infant funerals, and veterans and religious groups that offer free services.
Symposium participants are already planning future collaborations on a collective publication. It has supported the start of an important research network across disciplines and institutions that will shape future scholarship and policy on this vital societal issue.
Support for the symposium was generously provided by the ESRC, the University of Cambridge’s competitive Policy Support Fund, Duke University, and St John’s College.