Loss of home: moving, eviction and the end of an era

“At the end I walked through every room one last time and switched off the light in each one. As if I were putting someone to sleep.”

That is how someone once described the last day in the house where he grew up. His parents had moved to a smaller flat, the house had been sold, the papers signed. It was all sensible, well thought through and agreed. And yet in the car on the way home — to his own home, where he has lived for fifteen years — he cried in a way he had not cried since his grandmother’s funeral. And then he felt a bit ridiculous: after all, it was only a house.

This post is about that “only”. About the loss of a home — when you move because you have to, when you are evicted from your flat, when water carries away what you have built, or when the house your parents lived in is sold. And about why the sadness that comes with it is often greater than we allow ourselves to admit.

Grieving for a lost home

The idea that losing a home can be a real loss is not new. At the end of the 1950s the old working-class neighbourhood of the West End in Boston was demolished to make way for new buildings. The psychologist Marc Fried and his colleagues followed the people who had to move out. In 1963 he published a report whose title says it all: Grieving for a Lost Home.

He found that 46 per cent of the women and 38 per cent of the men showed at least a fairly severe grief reaction — described in terms no different from grief for someone who has died: emptiness, longing, restlessness, the feeling that the world had become strange. Many experienced this long after the move, even though some had moved into better housing than they had before. The quality of the new place, in other words, did not erase the loss of the old one.

This finding matters because it captures very precisely why those around us understand the loss of a home so poorly. People think of square metres, of the price, of whether the new flat is “nicer”. But what we grieve is something else.

What a home really is

Environmental psychology uses the term place attachment for the bond between a person and a place. The Canadian researchers Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford divided it into three parts that are always intertwined: the person who is attached, the psychological process that makes up the bond, and the place itself.

The person is about memories and identity: this is where I took my first steps, where I argued with my father, where I first brought my child home. The process is about what we feel and do in relation to a place — safety, habits, the way your hand finds the light switch in the dark by itself. The place is about physical and social things: the view from the window, the creaking stair, the neighbour who knows when you usually get home.

The Polish researcher Maria Lewicka, who reviewed four decades of research on place attachment, notes that the bond is stronger in people who have lived somewhere longer, who are woven into neighbourly relationships there and who have lived through important life events in that place. None of this is surprising. What is surprising is how little room we give it when we have to say goodbye to a place.

The body remembers a place

A home is not only a memory; it is also a bodily habit. The body knows how many steps lead down to the cellar, what sound the door makes when someone comes home, where the morning sun falls. This knowledge is quiet, but it calms us: in a familiar space the nervous system can let go, because it does not have to keep checking its surroundings.

That is why the first weeks in a new place are often more tiring than we expect. People sleep worse, are irritable, cannot find things and feel like strangers in their own lives. Add the pressure of the move itself — money, deadlines, packing — and everything we know as chronic stress can show up.

From attachment theory we know that when we feel threatened, we turn to a secure base. For a child, that is a parent. For an adult, it is often also a place — somewhere you return to and where you can be who you are. When you lose your home, you lose that secure base for a while too. And precisely when you need it most.

When you don’t choose to move

It is hardest when you did not choose the move. Eviction, a forced sale, a divorce in which you are the one who has to leave, or a natural disaster that turns a house into a building site overnight. In the floods of August 2023, many Slovenian families lost their homes, or most of what was in them, within a few hours. Many then spent months living between two worlds — with relatives, in temporary accommodation, while their thoughts stayed in a house that could no longer be saved.

The American psychiatrist Mindy Fullilove described the consequences of forced displacement as a shock that affects not only the individual but the whole web of relationships tied to a place. When neighbours are scattered, what is lost is not only a flat but also a network of people who helped one another, lent each other tools and kept an eye on each other’s children.

With eviction, shame joins the loss. Research by the sociologist Matthew Desmond in American cities showed that mothers who had been evicted reported depression and poorer health more often a year or two later than comparable mothers who had not been through it. Shame is an important part of the story: people often hide the loss, withdraw from friends and end up alone precisely when they most need a community.

If you are in a situation like this, the first question is a practical one: where will you sleep, who can help with the costs, what rights do you have. In Slovenia you can turn to the social work centre (center za socialno delo) in your municipality. Grief can wait. But it should not wait for ever.

When your parents’ house is sold

A special kind of home loss comes in adulthood: when your parents move into a care home, when one of them dies and the other can no longer manage alone, or when both have died and the house has to be sold. Then you lose a place you have not lived in for a long time — and yet it was always there. A place you could go back to. Proof that your childhood exists.

In Slovenia this loss is often even harder, because a house is frequently the work of the whole family. Father built it at weekends, with cousins and neighbours, mother planted the garden, and every room has its own story about how it came to be. Selling a house like that means selling part of the family story. And brothers and sisters rarely talk about this properly, because they talk about the price, the buyer and who will take what.

This is exactly where disputes often begin. A conversation between two sisters might sound like this (composite, not a real person):

“Why won’t you sign? The buyer won’t wait for ever.”
“Because you’re acting as if we were selling a car.”
“Because it’s only a house. Mum and Dad aren’t in there any more.”
“Maybe not for you. I still see them in the kitchen.”

Neither sister is right or wrong. One protects herself from grief by being practical. The other protects herself by putting things off. Both are grieving — each at her own pace. Once this is put into words, the argument about signing often turns into a conversation about how to say goodbye together. I wrote about similar decisions regarding the belongings of someone who has died in What to do with his belongings, and about how badly people underestimate the loss of a parent in adult life in The death of a parent in adulthood: the loss everyone underrates.

A chosen move is a loss too

Even a move you want — to a bigger flat, in with a partner, to another city for work — brings some loss. People find this hard to admit, because it feels ungrateful: “I wanted this myself, so why do I feel so bad?” But every transition has two parts. Something begins and something ends. I wrote more about this in New job, new city, new chapter: the psychology of life transitions.

A move after a break-up is especially often overlooked. When a couple separates, one partner — sometimes both — also loses a shared home. Grief for the relationship and grief for the place become intertwined, which I write about in Divorce as grief. Not all losses are the same, and it helps to know which one has hit us.

The difference between these forms lies mainly in control. Where the move was your decision, you will mostly need to allow yourself to grieve. Where it was not, you will first need to feel that the ground beneath you is solid again — only then will there be room for grief. And where you are saying goodbye to your parents’ home, you will share the loss with people who each experience it in their own way.

How to say goodbye to a place

When someone dies, we have rituals: the funeral, candles, anniversaries. When we lose a home, there are hardly any. The last day is usually the day of the removal van, the boxes and the cleaners — and we say goodbye somewhere between carrying out the wardrobes. That is why it is worth creating a ritual yourself.

Some people walk through all the rooms one last time and pause in each for a moment. Others photograph every room before it is emptied, or record the sound of the house. Some take something small with them — a stone from the garden, a door handle, a tile from the bathroom. Others again invite friends to a last supper in the empty kitchen. There is no right ritual. There is only the difference between a departure you mark and a departure that simply happens to you.

What you do in the new place matters just as much. Place attachment does not form by itself; it forms through repetition. The same route for a walk, the same baker, the same bench. Once we have made a few routes like that, the body slowly begins to relax. It also helps to bring something from the old place into the new one — not to imitate it, but so that the story can carry on.

Exercise: a map of the home that is gone

This exercise is for people who have lost a home — recently or years ago — and feel that the loss still makes itself heard. It takes about half an hour.

1. Draw a floor plan of the home as you remember it. Do not try to be accurate. Draw the rooms, the garden, the path to the door.
2. Write one memory into each room — the first that comes. It can be a happy one or a difficult one. Both belong to a home.
3. Mark the room you miss most and ask yourself: what did I have there that I do not have now? Peace, company, a view, the feeling that I mattered?
4. Look for where you could have that now. Not in the same form, but in a similar one: a corner with good light, a regular dinner with friends, a window where you drink your coffee.
5. Keep the map. You do not have to show it to anyone. It is proof that the home was real — and that you carry part of it with you.

If the exercise overwhelms you, stop. It makes sense to open up grief a little at a time, not all at once. And if you notice that thoughts of the people who lived with you come up as you do it, perhaps you are not grieving only for a place — but also for a time and for the relationships that were woven into it.

Where this explanation falls short

I want to be honest about the limits of what I have written.

Not every home was safe. For some people, home was a place of violence, fear or neglect. Leaving it may bring mostly relief — or a confusing mixture of relief and sadness, because it was, after all, the only home you had. Both are understandable. If home is not safe now, this is not the time for grief but for safety: in Slovenia, the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence is available on 080 11 55, and in an emergency call the police on 113 or 112.

Nostalgia can beautify. The memory of a home often keeps the rooms and forgets the quarrels. Someone who cannot let go of an old home is sometimes grieving not for a place but for an idealised version of their life that never existed. There is nothing wrong with that — but it is worth knowing.

Not every move is a trauma. Many people move and are getting on with their lives within a few weeks. Sadness after a move is not compulsory, and its absence is not a sign that you are cold. The loss of a home deserves to be taken seriously, but it does not need to be inflated.

When the sadness does not lift. If months after a move you are still sleeping badly, have no energy, are withdrawing from people or thinking there is no point any more, it is right to seek help — from your GP or a psychotherapist. This is especially true when the loss of a home has come on top of other losses, which I described in The grief nobody acknowledges. If you have thoughts of death, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan helpline on 116 123.

If losing your home takes you to another country, the story is a little different again — that is the subject of Losing your homeland: moving abroad and the quiet grief that follows. And if a home is lost because of an illness that required a different way of living, this loss becomes intertwined with the one I write about in Loss of health.

What to remember

• The loss of a home is a real loss — as early as the 1960s, research showed that grieving for a home can resemble grieving for someone who has died.
• A home is an interweaving of person, process and place: you lose a space, part of the story about yourself and the secure base your body knew.
• Forced moves and evictions also bring shame and the loss of a community; first you need safety, then room for grief.
• The sale of a parents’ home is a loss that siblings experience each at their own pace — it helps to talk about it, not only about the price.
• Saying goodbye to a place deserves a ritual, and a new home needs time and repetition to become yours.