Dying is more painful when society won’t listen – stories of financial hardship that show how end-of-life care needs to change

I’m stuck in here with nowhere to sit outside as I can’t walk to the park anymore. I need my mum staying with me and she’s on the couch – there’s no spare bedroom. I just feel trapped up here. Every morning they have the diggers digging the road. I’ve got three brain tumours. I need to move.

Less than a year from her death, Stacey, aged 37, still did not look like someone who was dying. But, suffering from the rare genetic condition Li-Fraumeni syndrome, she was experiencing excruciating pain. By the time of her death, she had cancers in her leg, breast, lymph nodes, back, heart, liver and brain.

Cruelly, this final period of her life was made much more stressful by the conditions in which she was required to live. Home was a cramped, one-bed housing association flat on the sixth floor of a high-rise tower block in Glasgow, Scotland, which she shared with her husband, Joost, and her mother, Irene. Sometimes, Stacey had to miss hospital appointments because the lift was not working, and she was unable to make it down the stairs to meet her taxi.

Even when she could make it outside, there were no green spaces nearby and nowhere to sit down. As Stacey’s health worsened, she told us how her living conditions were making everything much more unpleasant for her: “There’s screaming kids in the corridor every single morning. It’s just awful. I don’t want to be here.”

Despite repeatedly asking her housing association for a move, and making multiple online bids for new flats, nothing happened. There was no sense that Stacey was being prioritised for a move, despite her time so clearly, and quickly, running out.

How a country treats its dying citizens says a lot about its values. The extreme distress experienced by some dying people is not limited to the physical pain caused by illness or disease. Their material circumstances, home environment, having to deal with unyielding bureaucracies, and – perhaps most significantly – a lack of recognition of their circumstances by others can all make a traumatic situation much harder.

Our research project, Dying In The Margins, was established in 2019 to better understand the experiences of people dying at home in circumstances of financial hardship and deprivation. Perhaps surprisingly, it is still not widely understood that the age we die at, what we die from, and the way we die are largely determined by our socioeconomic circumstances over the course of our lives.

Our project has sought to identify the root causes – economic and political as well as social – of the inequalities in care and support that heightened many of our participants’ pain and distress as their lives came to an end. We gave our participants cameras and also commissioned a professional photographer, Margaret Mitchell, to document their lives. We also made digital stories to encourage empathy for these distressing end-of-life stories – and if possible, action where words alone might not.

‘They said it was my fault – I know it’s not’

The shock to me – and this is why you’re doing the study – is that I’ve come to realise there is no care or support for people like me, living in areas like mine, where my family don’t want anything to do with me. I truly don’t have a voice. And I was thinking: how hard does this have to get?

Liz was 73 and dying of lung cancer when she signed up to take part in our study. While much closer to the average age of death than Stacey, she was still below the average for women dying in the UK. Like Stacey, she lived in a high-rise block of flats, in an area ranked among Scotland’s most deprived.

Liz was a fashion lover – the brighter the colours, the better. She had lived in her flat for more than a decade and, unlike Stacey, didn’t want to move despite its shortcomings. The flat was strewn with a lifetime of mementos and extensive clothing collections which brought Liz comfort and identity. She wanted to remain in her home, until the very end of her life – but just outside her flat, extensive black mould had taken hold which was now seeping into her bedroom. Liz was breathing in spores every night.

The health risks of prolonged exposure to mould were highlighted by the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak in Rochdale in 2020. But as with Stacey’s situation, the housing association which managed Liz’s flat appeared unresponsive to her requests for help. She felt blamed by them for keeping her thermostat low, which she did to keep her heating costs down, telling us: “The housing worker came out and said it was my fault, but it’s not – it’s black outside. They won’t listen to me.”

Eventually, the housing association power-washed the exterior of the building, but Liz was told she would need to move out to deal with the interior. With so little time left, she couldn’t face the disruption. The Guardian highlighted a similar case in 2023, of a man forced to spend his final weeks “in a property plagued with damp and black mould after efforts by his family and the council to find another home failed”.

When dealing with housing issues at the very end of her life, Liz was met with a system which felt unresponsive to her needs. She perceived that the people working within that system sometimes did not believe her and lacked compassion, despite the fact that she was dying:

What if I lived in Milngavie [an affluent area of Glasgow] and was surrounded by loving sons and daughters that have done really well and had a beautiful house? What if I was a professional person? I suspect my care would be different.

Liz didn’t have any children and was estranged from her other family. Her partner was struggling with mental health issues of their own, so could not care for Liz at the end of her life. Dying alone with no one to care for her pre-occupied Liz’s thoughts, and she told us it was “getting too hard to cope with”:

I’m [usually] very optimistic but it’s hard for me to face this. What I’ve experienced over the last six months with my landlord, with my own family, makes life tough. People have backed off. Please don’t think terminal patients get all the care – they don’t. They get the opposite.

The craft of dying

It is only very recently that any significant portion of human beings find themselves ‘dying’ for a long enough period of time for the issue of how best to go about it meaningfully to be raised.

In her groundbreaking 1978 book, The Craft of Dying, American sociologist Lyn Lofland highlighted that modern society’s prolongation of the dying-to-death period could be both a source of problems and potentials:

It seems probable that at least some portion of the many differences among humans dealing and coping with death has to do with which [form of] death they confront … It seems likely that, eventually, humans will construct for themselves a new, or at least altered, death culture and organisation – a new ‘craft of dying’.

Almost half a century after Lofland wrote these words, many dying people still aren’t able to control their death in the way she foretold – perhaps because they aren’t given a clear prognosis by their doctor, or do not want to “hear” their prognosis when they are.

In Liz’s case, she identified herself explicitly as “terminally ill”, yet said this status was not recognised by many of the people she was in regular contact with – from fellow churchgoers and neighbours in her tower block to housing association officials.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Living on her own and without the understanding of people around her, Liz was reliant on a home care service to support her with washing, dressing and making meals. But the company wanted to arrive at her flat at 8am each morning, and offered her only half an hour of care each day. This was never going to be enough to enable her to die at home – and besides, she often wanted to sleep in after a fitful night disturbed by all the noise both inside and outside her tower block.

The inadequacies in Liz’s care package made her feel disempowered – contradicting one of the key reasons people want to die at home: to retain a feeling of control and autonomy. Without family and friends to help with end-of-life care, the opportunity to die at home is much less likely.

Liz would have benefitted from a dedicated end-of-life advocate, who could have represented her needs to all the bureaucracy she was encountering; someone who could have made her feel less alone, and reassured her as she faced her impending death:

I think I would appreciate someone coming to my home to have an honest conversation with me, because I think I’m in denial. No one has come and said: ‘Have you really thought about this? Where would you like to pass away your last days?’ I don’t know why I’ve never brought this up with the doctor – I don’t have the courage to bring it up.

The modern hospice movement

Fears about the future are a frequent cause of suffering and distress for those nearing death. Similarly, people often feel discomfort when dealing with someone who is terminally ill – Lofland put this down to a widespread lack of familiarity with this new social role.

Fortunately, Liz was connected to a hospice team run by end-of-life charity Marie Curie, and assigned a palliative care social worker who sought to ease her worries about her living situation and the difficulties in her relationships, as well as her physical pain. But this is a rarity: the UK has only a few hundred palliative care social workers to assist the hundreds of thousands of people who die with such care needs each year.

Ultimately, Liz moved into the local Marie Curie hospice, where she was cared for at no cost until her death. However much she had wanted it, dying at home was no longer possible. Her home could be considered “insecure” because it was porous to outside elements – both damp and noise pollution. There was a lack of security caused by having no one living in the house with her and supporting her with her end-of-life care needs. And her body was no longer secure due to the severity of her symptoms.

People like Liz who live alone and in more deprived areas are more likely to spend longer in hospital at the end of their lives, and to die there too. Happily for Liz, the availability of a hospice meant she could avoid this scenario.

The modern hospice movement stemmed from the European model of care for the “dying poor” in the late 19th and early 20th century. In the UK, these homes cared for people who were too sick for the workhouses. While there was a strong salvationist ethos in these early hospices (and a clear interest in deathbed conversion to Christianity), there was also a philanthropic element whereby care and comfort could be offered to those with nowhere else to go.

This spirit of offering a sanctuary for people whose homes have become unsafe continues in today’s hospice movement, though without the same kind of moralising impetus which dominated the Victorian era. (In comparison, the UK’s care home sector is beset with structural challenges, and its “invisibility” as the poor relation to the NHS means it has lagged behind the hospice sector in terms of specialised care of the dying.)

In the UK, hospices support around 300,000 people annually, with 5% of the 650,000 people who die each year doing so in a hospice. A typical hospice costs around £1.6 billion a year to run, paid for by both private and public funds – with less than £0.5 billion coming from the UK government.

Recently, most hospices have moved from in-patient units to a “hospice at home” model – in theory, meaning they can serve more people and enable more home deaths, in line with what people say they want. But they are also facing “the worst funding crisis in two decades”, with one in five hospices cutting their services, according to research by Hospice UK.

The independent governance arrangements of hospices, and their unique position outside state bureaucracy, arguably gives them the power to carve out their own priorities in an increasingly unequal world. A redirection of funding towards those “on the margins” with greatest need might not be popular with the main charitable donors to hospices – but it may equally give hospices a reinvigorated sense of their original philanthropic mission.

While Liz told us she was happy in the hospice and felt safe and comfortable there, she was no longer surrounded by her worldly possessions and had very few visitors. The hospice was a long way from her neighbourhood and her partner, whose only means of visiting her was a long and expensive bus journey.

Nonetheless, unless there is a wholesale pivot towards ensuring adequate and sustainable care packages for people in their homes, the need for in-patient units in hospices in which people like Liz can die safely will continue – and demands greater support.

‘He just wanted to get home to his dog’

Max, like Liz, was clear that he wanted to die at home. The army veteran had experienced much trauma in his life, including periods of homelessness and substance misuse. But unlike Liz, who had no one to provide informal care at home, Max had friends who looked after him on rotation – and his dog, Lily, to keep him company.

Max had difficult symptoms, experienced considerable pain, and could be a challenging person to care for. When we interviewed one of Max’s friends after his death, it became clear just how exhausting caring for him had been. His friends were also living insecurely and struggling with financial hardship – which research shows adds more stress to this already demanding role.

The costs of death may also be felt by these friends and relatives, who often pay for funerals they can barely afford. Sometimes there are debts – on credit cards, with utility companies – that need to be serviced post-death.

According to his friend, Max had undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – something that is known to re-emerge or become exacerbated when someone nears the end of their life. “He would take the dog out to the park at night because he couldn’t sleep,” this friend explained, “and sometimes our relationship could be very volatile.”

When Max’s symptoms became too difficult to manage at home, he was admitted to the local hospice – but he struggled with the change of environment. On one occasion, when asked to hand over cash to be put in the hospice safe, he refused and made a “great escape” (as Max put it) from the hospice. He apparently wanted to “get back home to his dog” and be free of institutional control.

Concerned for Max’s safety, the hospice contacted the police, who deployed search dogs and helicopters in their search for the dying man. This made us wonder if his care had taken sufficient account of past traumas from his time serving in the military or living on the streets. While the search was well-intentioned, there was a danger of treating Max like a criminal and retraumatising him.

In the end, this can be seen as a success story. Once located, the hospice took a different approach with Max, enabling his desire to remain at home for as long as possible – up to only a week before he died.

But it also highlights the financial and health impacts on caregivers, especially those who are struggling to make ends meet. With the predicted increase in people dying at home in coming decades, there will be a parallel increase in the burden of costs placed on family and friends. Such “lay” caregivers often really want to be involved, and empowered to take control of situations. But they require both professional and financial support to do so.

‘The human factor is gone’

The day Stacey finally got keys to a new ground-floor, two-bed flat, she arrived with her husband Joost – and immediately collapsed. She was blue-lighted to hospital, and from there moved to a hospice she never left. After all those requests for a move out of her cramped Glasgow high-rise, Stacey never even got to spend a night in her new home.

Despite her remarkable ability to self-advocate, the social housing system appeared completely unresponsive to Stacey’s needs and her end-of-life distress – perhaps presuming the hospital and care sectors would take the strain. Afterwards, Joost wrote:

Tragically, as Stacey stepped out of the car, she collapsed in front of her new home. She was the proudest woman in the world, and her dream ended on the doorstep. Her dream, after ten years of battling cancer, was a simple two-room flat – that was all she wanted. This is the UK, one of the richest countries in the world, yet this can happen. Why are terminally ill people not assisted more promptly by housing associations when they need it, to have just a few happy, worry-free final years of life?

Shockingly, within two weeks of his wife’s death, the housing association served Joost an eviction notice from the flat they had fought so hard to move into. The notice arrived three days before his wife’s funeral.

It is not uncommon for relatives to be missed off tenancy agreements when they have moved in to undertake a caring role in the last years or months of someone’s life. When Stacey signed the tenancy agreement, Joost was not listed as a spouse and co-tenant. This human error in the advice given to her while in the hospice meant when she died, he immediately lost his tenancy rights.

When Joost contacted us about the eviction order, we were shocked by this seeming lack of compassion and disregard for Joost’s grief-stricken state. As he later told the BBC: “The human factor is completely gone.”

In response to his request for help, our research team worked with Marie Curie and a local politician to publicise his story. Eventually, the housing association agreed to extend his tenancy on the flat by four months to give him time to grieve and make alternative living arrangements. Months after Joost had vacated the property, we found out that it was still empty.

Marie Curie is now lobbying the Scottish government for tenancy succession rights to be extended for 12 months post-death. Meanwhile, other stories of relatives being evicted and finding themselves homeless soon after a close bereavement have also highlighted this “hidden” housing issue.

For people who are grieving, life is not “business as usual”. Just as people’s distress at the end-of-life can be worsened by financial insecurity and vulnerable circumstances, so people’s grief can become more complicated and prolonged through bureaucratic callousness.

How easy is it to die at home?

In future, many countries will have no choice but to shift much further from institutional dying, which has become the norm over the last century, to dying at home, because of the increasing number of old people and the resulting pressure on hospitals. Conveniently for policymakers, most of us want to die at home, surrounded by the people we know and love in a place that brings comfort in this final, frightening stage of life.

But how easy will it be to die at home? According to our research, not easy at all – because how and where we die is an increasingly unequal issue for many societies.

How we die often involves many intermediaries other than healthcare professionals – including employers, social security officials, housing officials and social care providers. And people struggling to make ends meet are likely to come into contact with more intermediaries and state agencies at the end of their life than those who are more affluent.

While many people have more protracted “dying time” than they did even a decade ago, this does not necessarily confer more meaningful time alive. Stacey, for example, had struggled to come to terms with her terminal prognosis, was only 37 when she died, and had lived with cancer for 10 years. How was she to know when to draw a line under her chemotherapy treatments, and when the balance had tipped from extending her life to merely extending her suffering?

Having this “goals of care” discussion – as popularised by US physician Atul Gawande in his 2014 book Being Mortal – is a key focus of palliative and end-of-life care. However, it is dependent upon first being able to have an open conversation about the patient’s prognosis, and how long they have left.

This is much more difficult in cases of multi-morbidity, which are on the rise in medically advanced countries such as the UK. In particular, people living in more deprived areas are more likely to die with multiple chronic conditions, while people with lower wealth also face more hospital admissions – in part because they simply have worse health.

Donna was 56 when she participated in our Dying in the Margins study. She was living with multiple chronic illnesses including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), osteoarthritis and liver cirrhosis. Most recently, she had been diagnosed with liver cancer. All these conditions combined meant she was nearing the end of her life.

Yet despite all her medical appointments and hospital stays, and all of the specialists she had encountered over the years, she had never once had a goals of care conversation, or a discussion about what she could expect as she neared the end of her life.

However, Donna was supported by a community link worker, a non-clinical practitioner responsible for helping with non-medical needs and linking her up with services. In a sense, this was the person providing her palliative care – by initiating goals of care conversations and introducing a more holistic approach to Donna’s care and wellbeing.

She had had a difficult life, experiencing financial insecurity, the premature death of her son, and unexpected caring responsibilities for her grandchildren. Through all of these, her link worker offered the continuity of care which was otherwise lacking.

Without this single point of contact looking at the overall picture or seeing a person’s life “in the round”, there are likely to be lost opportunities to initiate a palliative approach to care – as Donna herself highlighted to us:

I was thinking the other day, maybe if they actually sat down and told me about my liver and then my pancreas and all that … They’ve not really explained how my illness will go on, if you know what I mean? I would like somebody to sit down. Just sit down and … I definitely want to know.

A new approach to dying

Dying is a social justice issue. Addressing people’s housing situations, enhancing their social security entitlements, adapting care to take account of trauma experienced during their lives – all are palliative care interventions, whether delivered by healthcare professionals or not.

Understanding this broader context is often referred to as a “new public health approach to dying” – one which involves whole communities.

Our research suggests the way we treat people who are dying needs to change. If we want to keep people out of hospital – and demographic and epidemiological trends suggest we must – then we need to rapidly and drastically improve the home support offered to people in the final stages of life. This support should not only be afforded to those who possess the most social and economic capital.

During the COVID pandemic, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) warned that, without action, end-of-life care in the UK faced an “eternal 2020” – in other words, the pressures felt in the health service during the pandemic could become the new normal. The IPPR report recommended hiring 2,700 end-of-life care advocates across the UK.

The experiences and insights of those we have interviewed – many of whom are no longer alive – show us that much end-of-life suffering could be reduced, or even avoided altogether, with more tailored support and recognition for those experiencing financial hardship and material deprivation.

The ability of people in our study to self-advocate until very close to their death was remarkable. We hope their legacy can be a more compassionate and responsive system for others who are running out of time.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• Assisted dying: first-hand accounts of what it’s like to help a loved one die

• Existential crisis: how long COVID patients helped us understand what it’s like to lose your sense of identity and purpose in life

• Loneliness, loss and regret: what getting old really feels like – new study

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

Naomi Richards received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council, part of UKRI (grant no. ES/S014373/1).