Why do we come together to mourn people who have died while homeless?

As I write this, it is the day before the annual service of St Martin in the Fields, dedicated to the memory of the people who died in our community. This is one of the most important days of the year for our homeless community in London. The church, whose nave seats about 500 people, will be overcrowded. The No Name Choir and Streetwise Opera will sing, and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble will perform the iconic composition. The blood of Jesus has never failed me. Community members and workers will participate in the service and conduct readings. Most importantly, we will read out the names of our dead.

Names will be read by people with past experience homelessnesspeople who are still homeless and people who work among the homeless. As the Reverend Richard Carter, the deputy vicar leading the service, puts it, these are “people who have experienced homelessness.” We will come together to honor our fallen. By reading each name, we keep the person close to all 500 people. By reading each name, we affirm that the person was loved and that they mattered.

As Gary Birdsall, one of the readers of the 2024 list, puts it: “These are memories, as I call it, of mates or friends who have been there – slept through it, been through it, found themselves in a situation of homelessness. We just remember them.”

Death researchers identify three types of grief rituals that are common to all cultures. Honoring, letting go and self-transformation. When someone dies, we need ritual to grieve effectively. We need to be able to touch the sacred—or the liminal—through some kind of service or process of collective memory that makes sense to the culture of the dead. We also need to transfer some of the grief into a physical object, this goal is often achieved by accessing the ashes or physical belongings of the person. These rituals are global to all human cultures. However, if they are homeless, they are often excluded. This multiplies and deepens our grief when we lose a community member, making healing nearly impossible. When a member of our community dies, we often do not know, are not informed, and are not invited to the funeral. This is usually due to a fragmented and exclusionary system where the concept of GDPR is used (mis)to create an unnecessary barrier between blood family and street family. This means that the street family cannot grieve and the blood family cannot hear how much the person was loved.

At the Museum of Homelessness, we have become unwitting specialists in death. Since 2019 we have been working project “Dying Homeless” which aims to document and commemorate everyone who dies homeless in the UK. This includes a national inquiry, the centerpiece of which is an annual count, online memorialan annual vigil outside Downing Street and year-round mourning events online and in person. On rare occasions, we were able to cut through unnecessary bureaucratic red tape and bring street and blood families together for a collective remembrance. These are great places to process the complex grief associated with homelessness, which can often include anger, shame and guilt.

This is very important, especially for trauma survivors who have already accumulated so many unprocessed emotions after the death of a friend. However, spaces, objects and rituals in homelessness places where people can grieve are few and far between. People make their own. This is evident from our research into the Dying Homeless Project, where makeshift memorials are being erected to commemorate people. Sparky’s Bench in Regent’s Park, with an unauthorized bronze memorial plaque stuck to it, Paddy’s Shrine on Queens Street, Cardiff, 100 people gather at a bus stop to remember Musa Sevimli, and one bus driver stops at rush hour to write: “Maybe be, Through your death you bring awareness to all who are struggling in this huge city, caption: bus driver.”