“No one will realize I’m dead”: from residential solitude to social death

Solitary living covers very diverse situations but it necessarily implies being deprived of residential sociability. Those affected must grapple with specific temporalities and, when this proves difficult, deploy relational strategies to cope with them. In certain cases, when such strategies are absent or inaccessible, these difficulties take the form of anxiety about dying alone at home: the imagined physical death is therefore coupled with a social death, marking the breakdown of the social bonds once woven around the person living alone.