And when they die, their body is not found a very long time. They have virtually no social contacts, perhaps no family or the family have moved away, or they’ve lost contact with them. The first one I like to describe is what I call a lone death, and that’s where someone lives on their own, has lived on their own for quite a long time. ![]() There is very much a kind of overlap between categories, and there’s very much a porous boundary between the different groupings. Now, I’m not putting these forward as kind of fixed groups or fixed categories. And looking at all the data from these different groups I’ve come to realise that there are various different ways in which people can be said to die alone. There’s no one to organise a funeral.Īnd I’ve also carried out some documentary analysis of things such as, for example, coroner cases where someone’s died alone at home and their body hasn’t been found for an extended period of time, and also a news media review. I have talked to nurses in particular, and most specifically palliative care nurses who look after people who are dying about their experiences and views around this issue.īut I’ve also talked to people who work in roles such as funeral directors, funeral celebrants, local authority workers, people who deal with the situation where a person has died and they have no one to take charge of the post death details. I have talked to people who’ve been bereaved about the experience of someone they cared about dying. I have carried out more than one research project with the issue of dying alone at its heart, and I’ve talked to older people who live on their own about their views. But once you actually start to look at this and unpick it a bit, I came to realise that in actual fact, there are a number of different ways in which people can die alone. When we talk about it in normal, everyday conversation, we talk about it as if there’s nothing unexpected about it – we know what we’re talking about when we say someone dies alone – we know what we mean. What I have discovered over the last years while researching dying alone and people’s choices and decisions around how they wished to end their lives, is that dying alone is actually a very complex thing. Now that’s really quite a complicated question to answer I think. So the question, I think, to begin with is what have you discovered are the reasons that a person might actually choose to die? And I know, obviously, you’ve spent pretty much a couple of years looking at the social management of lone deaths. You seem perfectly placed to talk to us about this because, you know, we make that big presumption that it would be such an awful, dreadful thing if one was to die alone. ![]() This interview was originally recorded for our podcast: Episode 23 End-of-Life Accompaniment and Lone Deaths. But why? Helping answer that question is sociologist Dr Glenys Caswell from Nottingham University. Some people plan very carefully to make sure they die alone. Nobody chooses to die alone, right? Wrong. End-of-Life Accompaniment and Lone Deaths
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