File number: 2021-00981. 67-year-old man, living alone. Friendly, helpful, but lonely, neighbors say. The food left in front of his door remained intact.
File number: 2022-00259. 56-year-old man, arrived alone from El Salvador in 1987. Without a fixed address, his nights were spent in shelters. His family? Unreachable, absent.
A number. A name. An unfinished story. Two cases among dozens, even hundreds of unclaimed bodies in Quebec. Every year, names are erased, lives disappear without an ornate coffin, without a farewell. Lives reduced to simple identifiers. They are “invisible deaths”, carried away by realities that we prefer to keep quiet: precariousness, loneliness, illness.
This week, we learned of the death of a 55-year-old man found dead on Place Simon-Valois, in Hochelaga, in the southeast of Montreal. Police say hypothermia could be the cause of the man’s death, without naming the social cause: a dire lack of affordable housing, adequate care and social support. These deaths, often described as “natural”, in reality hide systemic failures.
The research work that we carry out, as sociologists and historians, seeks to give substance to these anonymous, invisible deaths. Being interested in the treatment of these deaths, beyond the body as an object to be managed, is to question the unequal value that we give to certain lives.
A body is said to be unclaimed when no loved one takes responsibility for it. The state, through the Department of Health and Social Services or the Coroner’s Office, then takes over. If no loved one comes forward within 72 hours of the search, the individual becomes an administrative statistic. From 2006 to 2015, the number of unclaimed bodies doubled in Quebec. Today, the province holds the sad Canadian record, surpassing Ontario. Despite this, no precise public register exists. The search for these missing people is bogged down in bureaucratic procedures, and the figures, collected piecemeal, remain fragmentary.
Lives marked by poverty and isolation
The phenomenon of unclaimed bodies reveals another important social reality: even in death, social inequalities persist. In Montreal, for example, it is particularly poor neighborhoods which concentrate the majority of cases. Among these invisible deaths, 85% are men, mainly aged 50 to 69. They are often homeless, elderly people who are precarious, sick, dead in unsanitary housing or on the street, victims of hypothermia, overdoses or chronic illnesses.
In the past, morgues displayed corpses publicly, hoping to identify the deceased. Today, in Montreal, a special team from the City of Montreal Police Department is trying to improve research to identify loved ones. But these efforts, although essential, do not resolve the underlying problem. If these individuals died alone, it is because they were already, in a way, invisible during their lifetime.
According to our research, families who choose not to claim a loved one often do so due to lack of means. The cost of a funeral, at a minimum of $2,500 in Quebec, is insurmountable for many. “Relatives sometimes want to offer a dignified burial, but they do not have the means,” the coroners and police officers involved in these cases explain to us.
For others, unclaimability results from broken ties. Isolation, whether linked to family conflicts, mental health problems or progressive social exclusion, condemns these individuals to die alone. Added to this are the difficulties for families located abroad in repatriating a body, a financial burden which proves insurmountable.
The human cost of failing social policies
If unclaimed bodies are a discreet reality, they reflect the failure of social policies to stem social poverty. Death sets in insidiously, exacerbated by the absence of support at critical moments: hospitalization without follow-up, lost housing, unrecovered job loss.
The resulting deaths are not just individual tragedies, but symptoms of a system that lets its most vulnerable citizens slip through the cracks. The absence of systematically collected public data on this phenomenon aggravates abandonment.
The tragic death of this unnamed 55-year-old man at Place Simon-Valois is a reminder that precariousness does not end with death. These are not simple statistics, but stories of broken lives, erased little by little by indifference. By highlighting these realities, it becomes impossible to ignore that the fight against poverty, exclusion and homelessness is, more than ever, a question of social justice.
