Requiem for the unclaimed dead

On a grassy hillside just east of downtown Los Angeles, a few dozen mourners gathered last week to pay respects to 1,865 people whose names they did not know — men, women and children whose ashes recently joined the remains of 100,000 others laid to rest here since 1896.

The departed interred at Los Angeles County Cemetery had one thing in common, and one thing separating them from those on the other side of the rusty chain link fence demarcating the county plot and neighboring Evergreen Cemetery: they had neither the means for a private burial, nor family to claim their bodies.

Each year in December, those whose remains have been unclaimed for three years are memorialized with an interfaith ceremony. On Thursday, members of the public looked on in respectful silence as representatives of L.A.’s many faiths acknowledged the dead the way they might have wanted: with a Buddhist chant, a smudging of sage, the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili, Hindi and Spanish.

The blessings said over the freshly turned earth hinted at the lives once lived. Many were unhoused. A small handful were never identified. Some were children.

Brian Donnelly drove from Hollywood to witness the ceremony. He suspects a number of the unhoused people he’s come to know from his neighborhood over the years are interred here, he said.

“I think it’s important,” he said of the ceremony, his voice catching. “You come into this world with somebody. You don’t deserve to go out alone.”

In recent years, those who track the way we live and die have noticed a disquieting change.

While there are more tools than ever to identify the unknown dead and track down surviving family members, the percentage of people whose next of kin cannot — or choose not — to claim their remains is increasing, a shift sociologists attribute to changing family dynamics, growing mobility and an epidemic of loneliness.

To go unclaimed “is kind of an exclamation point on a life that was marked by social isolation, especially in later years,” said Pamela Prickett, an associate professor of sociology at Pomona College. “We’re not fully grasping just how much our sense of what we owe each other has changed.”

Prickett is the author, with UCLA sociologist Stefan Timmermans, of “The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels.” In their research, Prickett and Timmermans found, less than 1.2% of those who died in L.A. county in the 1970s were unclaimed by next of kin. In 2013, the most recent year from which data is available, 2.75% of county decedents were not picked up.

That number has continued to rise, the researchers write, both in Los Angeles County and beyond. The percentage of decedents unclaimed in Maryland, one of few states that maintains such records, was 2.1% in 2000 and 4.5% in 2021, the book notes.

To be unclaimed does not in itself mean that a person was unloved in life or unmissed in death. Prickett sees it as the culmination of several significant shifts in the way we live, the net effect of which becomes apparent only once we’ve died.

When the county picks up a person who has died in a facility, residence or public area, and no will or person with power of attorney can be found, the Office of Decedent Affairs and the public administrator work to locate next of kin and determine if the deceased died with any assets. If the county can’t find any living relatives but the deceased had enough savings, the public administrator arranges for a private burial.

Longer lifespans increase the likelihood of a person outliving siblings, spouses and even adult children who might step forward to claim them. They also increase the chance that a person will outlive their financial resources.

“Because somebody died at that moment without money doesn’t mean that the years preceding that were ones in which they didn’t have money,” Prickett said. “It might just be that the nursing home costs zapped their savings.”

If the person died penniless but the notified next of kin does not pick up the body, the county arranges for cremation. It stores the cremated remains for three years, in case a relative comes forward to claim them. Very often, they don’t.

L.A. County charges roughly $400 to pick up cremated remains. Many next of kin lack the ready cash, or the wherewithal to navigate the legal process to waive the fee.

Genealogist Megan Smolenyak is the founder of Unclaimed Persons, a team of volunteer researchers who have assisted local jurisdictions, including L.A. County, in tracking down next of kin.

Some tell Smolenyak that the quality of their relationship with the deceased doesn’t justify the cost of picking up their ashes or arranging a funeral.

“Sometimes, even when there’s quite close living relatives, they just won’t accept the responsibility of being next of kin because they can’t afford it,” Smolenyak said. “It’s like, “I haven’t heard from them in 20 years, and I can’t just afford a funeral out of the blue.’

The COVID pandemic may have further weakened family connections. With restrictions on travel and hospital visitations, final reconciliations with family that may have happened in other years simply didn’t, said the Rev. Chris Ponnet, a Catholic priest and director of spiritual care at Los Angeles General Medical Center.

“It was just a lot of people, all alone,” he said.

Those whose ashes were buried this week died in 2021. The county has not yet released the names of those interred, which will eventually be publicly available in case long-lost kin come seeking them.

On one side of the chain link fence ringing the county cemetery, the brilliant red of tinsel and fresh poinsettias adorning Evergreen graves stood out against the gray stone and sky. On the other, the people of Los Angeles went about their business — some of them lonely, some of them unhoused, some unaware that they were passing the place they will one day come to rest.