An investigation into loneliness, death and moral communities in the Danish Vigil Programme. What are the things that make a moral community, and which part does the moral community play in neoliberal times as values of individual responsibility gradually replace ideas of a common good? How do people in moral communities see their interaction with each other and with the people or the cause they serve?

This project examines those questions in terms of ethnographic field work among the people in the Vigil Programme in Denmark. ’No one should die alone’ is a frequent answer to why they sit vigil at a stranger’s death bed. Denmark has a long history of volunteering, with people committing to visit marginalised, ill or lonely people. The exceptional thing with the Vigil programme is that the people in the programme are often not contacted until the dying process has begun.

In a landscape of aging characterised by powerful debates on healthy, active and successful aging – with a distinct lack of illness, old age and death in the debates – anthropologist Lone Grøn bases her project on the emergence of the Vigil programme in Denmark. Through ethnographic field work she examines the how and why of sitting vigil at a death bed and providing care for a dying fellow citizen. And she examines how encountering mortality may be an ethical response to 1. prescribing medication to address old age and death, and the taboos around it – and an ethical response to 2. increasingly individualized forms of life and death in Denmark.