'People switch off the grief': coroners' report shows grim toll on homeless communities

A Christmas dinner at a shelter for those without homes is still a Christmas dinner. So the host stands to toast fellow diners. The host also honours familiar faces who aren’t there to eat and enjoy the meal.

And this year, there are too many names.. It’s a list. Eight people at one little shelter who will miss not only this Christmas, but every coming one.

For people who are homeless in British Columbia and the Fraser Valley, recent years have exacted a harrowing toll. Shortly before those Christmas meals, the BC Coroners Service released a report showing that 39 people without homes in Langley, Chilliwack, and Abbotsford perished in 2022. That figure represents a massive increase from seven years prior, when coroners recorded the deaths of just seven people without homes. And 2023 is likely to have been just as deadly.

Hundreds of deaths

The increasing number of deaths among homeless people are largely attributable to the toxic drug crisis.

Across BC, a staggering 342 people without homes died in 2022. That figure was nearly a threefold increase from just three years prior and an even-larger jump from 2015, the first year for which figures are available. (The figures include those staying in homeless shelters.)

Accidental deaths due to drugs accounted for more than 90% of all those who perished last year. While drug-related deaths have been responsible for the majority of homeless fatalities for as long as records have been released, their share of the toll has risen considerably since 2015.

(Despite the vastly larger number of people without homes now compared to 2015, non-drug causes of death have remained relatively stable. Deaths by suicide and natural causes—18 this year; 19 in 2015—haven’t risen significantly. But, disturbingly, 2022 also saw the homicides of eight people who were homeless, including two deliberately targeted in Langley. That’s by far the highest number of killings of any year for which figures are available.)

The toxic drug crisis is not confined to homeless populations. Although most homeless people who died were killed by toxic drugs, the majority of those succumbing to deadly drugs are not homeless. With nearly 2,400 people dying in BC from unregulated drugs in 2022, homeless men and women accounted for just 12% of that figure.

But that proportion is still extremely high considering the relatively tiny size of homeless communities. What it means in real life is that people who have no homes are seeing their friends and loved ones die on a regular basis.

Jesse Wegenast, the executive director of Sparrow Community Cares Society, has seen the toll first hand. It was Wegenast who stood up at Christmas in Sparrow’s shelter for older adults to toast the holiday season—and to acknowledge shelter visitors who had died in the last year.

And looking around, he saw recognition in the faces of those at the meal. Almost everyone present knew most of the eight men and women who died.

The loss is hard to process. So people don’t. They can’t.

“People don’t even have the emotional bandwidth,” Wegenast said. “People switch off the grief part as much as possible.”

Wegenast has been a key figure in outreach and advocacy efforts in Abbotsford for more than a decade. In recent years, officiated at more than a dozen funerals for those who have died from overdoses. He’s helped deal with the lifeless bodies of colleagues, heard first-responder friends talk about the daily struggle to save people, and erected memorial after memorial to those lost.

“People are just dying all the time,” he continued. “You just switch it off. I don’t think it’s that unlike people in conflict zones. You have to continue to live your life. And you don’t really have the choice to be swallowed up in your grief…. For me it just feels like so many people who you had a meal with.”

When new figures are released, they’ll document the December overdose death of a “well-known and well-loved” older man in his 60s in Abbotsford extreme weather shelter, Wegenast said.

The emotional trauma has changed people. It’s toughened some people. It’s brought some together.

“A lot of people have seen each other cry now and been together to support each other in different ways,” he said. “It’s really sad it has to exist, but for many there is a closeness.”

But there’s no actual bright side. Just people trying to hold back the darkness. Because each loss compounds the grief—and with it, the likelihood of future death.

‘Housing, housing, housing, housing’

Many people use drugs to cope with pain, whether emotional or physical. And each death that adds to the pain, each loss that leaves a person more isolated, compounds the issue.

“It’s like a snake eating its own tail,” Wegenast said.

To stop that cycle, Wegenast says one need trumps all others: “Housing, housing, housing, housing.”

“We’re just going to keep seeing people die untimely accidental deaths, whether it’s through exposure, whether through drug poisoning, whatever it may be, until we find a way to make housing more affordable.”

People with homes are also using and dying from drugs in large numbers. But not nearly at the same rate.

“A big fueler of drug use and addiction is hopelessness and lack of connections and right now,” Wegenast said.

He said he imagines himself as a man living in a tent with a drug addiction, and thinks about whether he would be able to improve his prospects given the myriad obstacles.

“I think ‘OK, I’m going to go to detox. Then I’m going to go to a treatment centre. Then I’m going to go to a second-stage house. And in six months, I’m going to come out a nice shiny penny of a man,’” he said. “Then what? I have no job. My disability check is $1,200 bucks a month or whatever [and] a one bedroom apartment is $1,100 a month. I’m dealing with chronic health issues, I won’t be able to afford anything. What’s out there for me? Where’s the hope?”

“A lot of people feel incredibly hopeless about their prospects.”