In the oldest human stories, the question always arises: who will bury my body? Who will lay me to rest? Heroes are tormented by their unburied soldiers; villains leave their dead henchman in the street. The good speak over the bodies of their dead, so we expect the good dead to have someone to speak for them. However, good and less-than-stellar people alike die in poverty and on the street, without identification or far away from anyone who might identify them. Anyone who has passed some human being sleeping under a bridge and thought there but for a couple of paychecks go I might have occasion to reflect on the ultimate misfortune: what becomes of the unloved dead?
The answer depends on where you die.
New York City has buried the unclaimed and indigent dead, including people who die while incarcerated on Hart Island for over a century. Bodies are buried at a rate of about 1,100 a year, with bumps around the time of Covid and AIDS, the latter prompting officials to dig graves extra deep given the then-unknown nature of the deadly disease. It’s also the final resting place of people too poor to afford burial, and stillborn babies whose parents lacked the resources to handle their death. Control of the island was passed to the parks department in 2021, with plans to develop and beautify the area to open it to the public and give the living a way to enjoy the space.
The city of Paris offers secular funerals with music and poems to people who die without provision. For the last twenty years, climate change across Europe has killed more and more elderly people, creating a need for government-funded burials for folks who couldn’t take the heat. Politicians have appeared at these burial rites, signaling that they can grieve for the dead, even if they refuse to take meaningful action to protect the living.
In San Francisco, where so many died of AIDS without family or anyone to claim them, there is a ritual and a custom for these lost souls. The city collects the remains of those who died alone and unclaimed and cremates them. The ashes are given to a ship called the Bravo, which is piloted out to the Golden Gate bridge. Poured out into the sea, the dead are sung out of this life by Louis Armstrong and offered a prayer by one of the people doing the job. The GPS coordinates of this burial are recorded, in case someone comes forward too late.
Customs around aging and dying vary throughout the world, but even nations with strong traditions of filial piety must decide what will become of the unloved dead. Municipalities across Japan hold these bodies with their information before defaulting to cremation and disposal. In 2023, there were 60,000 of these folks who had no one to see to their final arrangements.
In places where cities, states, or countries lack the funding to properly store or identify the unclaimed dead, the results can be very hard on people who are searching for the remains of the lost. In New Orleans, bureaucracy hindered by poverty has kept families from claiming their family members’ corpses until decomposition has rendered them unrecognizable. Why would that be? Well, keeping a dead body fresh requires a great deal of refrigeration, and identification takes paid hours. If a municipality is running short on either, the results can be grisly. Quick cremation seems a mercy, in light of failures like that.
In some places, the dead may have to rely on the kindness of strangers.
Someone dear to me recently called to tell me that he’d paid for an unclaimed member of his community. He had reached out to try and find this man’s people, and, failing that, he’d done the work of the remains, as well.
He called me to ask, “Why did I do that?”
Death is one of those things that will elicit responses we didn’t know were in us. Our honor is deeply involved, our sense of responsibility to the people around us and our belief in what is proper may manifest from parts of our past or our morality with which we rarely converse. What we do in these moments always reveals something of who we are, and that revelation may be a surprise to everyone involved.
“It’s what we do,” I told him with all the compassion I could offer. “It’s what I hope someone would do for me, too.”
I am grateful for the folks who love the unloved dead.
