Older homeless persons can experience relief when accessing housing. However, becoming housed can also elicit the (re)emergence of loss and grief. Building on the notion of disenfranchised grief, this study sought to better understand how grief works together with relief to shape older persons’ experiences living in long-term transitional housing.
Eleven older persons with experience of homelessness participated in up to three photovoice interviews in Montreal, Canada. Informed by the principles of interpretative phenomenology, their accounts and photos were analyzed to capture the nuances and depth of their lived experiences.
Analysis showed that relocation to long-term transitional housing allows for the re-emergence of grief associated with past losses, while also provoking new forms of grief related to housing conditions and anticipated losses. Analysis further revealed that a failure to recognize these losses, alongside a lack of resources to support the grieving process, can result in an accumulation of losses that widens the gap between older homeless persons’ experiences and the world around them.
If left unattended, grief and loss can threaten older homeless persons’ reaffiliation when relocating to transitional housing. Adopting a humanistic-existential grief perspective could go a long way in supporting the development of housing policies, programs and practices that nurture the time and space required to attend to grief and truly address precarity in the final stages of life.
