As I write this, it is the day before the annual St Martin-in-the-Fields service commemorating people who have died in our community. This is one of the most important days of the year for our homeless community in London. The church, which seats about 500 people in the nave, will be full. Both Choir with No Name and Streetwise Opera will perform and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble will perform the iconic The blood of Jesus has not yet failed me. Community members and workers will attend the service and do the readings. Most importantly, we will read the names of our dead.

Names will be read by people with previous experience homelessnesspeople who are still homeless and people who work in homelessness. As the Reverend Richard Carter, associate vicar who leads the service, says, it is “people who have known homelessness”. We will gather to honor our dead. By reading each name, we keep the person with all 500 people there. By reading each name, we affirm that the individual was loved and that he mattered.

As Gary Birdsall, one of the readers of the list for 2024, says: “It’s to remember, as I call it, comrades or friends who have been there – slept outside, been through it, been in need shelter. We just remember them.”

Death researchers identify three types of grief rituals evident in all cultures. Honoring, liberation and self-transformation. When someone dies, we need ritual to grieve effectively. We must be able to touch the sacred – or liminal – with some kind of service or process of collective remembrance that makes sense for the culture of the deceased. We also need to transfer some of the pain into a physical object, this goal often being accomplished by accessing the person’s ashes or physical possessions. These rituals are universal to all human cultures. However, in homelessness, these are often prevented from happening. This multiplies and deepens our pain when we lose a community member—making healing nearly impossible. When a member of our community dies, we often do not know, we are not informed and we are not invited to the funeral. This is usually due to a fragmented and exclusive system where the concept of GDPR is (incorrectly) invoked 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.

In the Museum of the Homeless, we became inadvertent specialists in death. Since 2019, we have been running The Dying Homeless Project which aims to document and honor all those dying of homelessness in the UK. This includes a national investigation, the centerpiece of which is an annual issue, year online memorialan annual vigil outside Downing Street and organizing grief spaces throughout the year online and in person. On rare occasions, we have been able to cut through unnecessary red tape and bring street family and blood family together for collective remembrance. These are beautiful spaces in which to process the complicated grief of homelessness, which can often include anger, shame, and guilt.

This is essential, especially for trauma survivors who already have so many unprocessed emotions when a friend dies. However, the spaces, objects and rituals of homelessness where people can be sad are few and far between. People make their own. This is evident in our research in the Dying Homeless Project, where makeshift memorials are born to remember people. Sparky’s bench in Regent’s Park, with an unauthorized bronze memorial tag superimposed, A shrine to Paddy in Queen’s Street, Cardiff, 100 people gathering at a bus stop to remember Musa Sevimli, with a bus driver stopped in rush hour traffic to write: “You still bring awareness with your death to all who struggle in this huge city, signed, bus driver.”