How To Bury Our Dead

At the end of every fiscal year, there is a reckoning. Let us account for the unclaimed dead.

The grave site for those who died in Los Angeles in 2021, and whose remains were never claimed

Last Thursday, for the first time since 2019, I was able to attend the annual Burial of the Unclaimed Dead at Evergreen Cemetery. Over the course of an hour or so, a series of officials and representatives of different faiths took turns to say a few words in different languages, or sing, or pray, or swing burning sage over a mass grave, containing the cremains of individuals who died in Los Angeles County in 2021. Standing silent on the hillside, dozens of Angelenos, some dressed in black, some carrying flowers, witnessed the ceremony and joined in the prayers. Strangers commemorating strangers. This year, the grave contained 1865 people. There has as yet been no publication of their names—where names are known—but this will happen. This ceremony has occurred, in one form or another, with varying numbers of onlookers, on the same site every year since 1896. It’s something Angelenos can be proud of.

Civilized humans take care of their dead. We do not leave them to rot where they fall. Instead, we gather them up, close their eyes, sponge their skin, and send them smoothed into the afterlife. These actions are both kind and sanitary: piles of maggoty corpses blackening in the street is a sure sign of war, plague, apocalypse. Our simple rituals keep the chaos at bay.

But: it’s gotten complicated. Modern funerary rites offer a final set of markers of social class. The very rich lie in state, in front of a cathedral full of well-heeled mourners, before beginning their eternal slumber inside an ornate, and tightly locked mausoleum bearing their family name. For millennia, the very poor have had a ceremony too, the ‘pauper’s funeral’, funded by local authorities, offered to those who die indigent, immigrant, impoverished. These people have often lived extraordinarily difficult and unlucky lives. Their remains will sit in storage for 2-3 years, as officials attempt to identify them and trace their next of kin. But biological relatives offer no guarantee of care: an estranged or distant family member may be unwilling or unable to afford to take any action. Instead, the unclaimed dead are finally laid to rest at public expense.

As to be expected with any line item in a city’s budget, paupers’ burials are minimal affairs, usually taking place at the nearest Potter’s Field. These are areas of land specifically set aside for the purpose, sometimes attached to municipal cemeteries,or situated on the grounds of an old hospital or asylum. The name comes from St. Matthew’s account of what happened when Judas tried to give his ill-gotten thirty pieces of silver to the temple priests. They

“took the silver pieces, and said, it is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” (Matthew 27:6-7)

The priests probably got a good deal. Traditionally, potters sought out land thick with clay soil, which holds water like a sponge, stays cold long into spring, and resists easy digging. Clay is great for making pots, horrible for plants. Potters dug dirty great holes for their raw materials, leaving the land even less fertile and more water-logged than before, and resold the plot cheaply to whoever felt they could make use of it. The perfect spot to offload deceased strangers, sometimes translated as ‘foreigners’.

In the 19th century, wave upon wave of foreigners came to live and die in North America. Many of them prospered, enough to buy their own monuments and burial plots. But a significant percentage did not. As cities bulged across the nation, municipalities acquired property for Potter’s Fields, separating them from the expensively landscaped, and often privately owned, park cemeteries. They disposed of the indigent in mass, unmarked graves. When one Potter’s Field filled up, it was abandoned, and a new one dug. Sometimes good records were kept, sometimes not, which has led to locations being forgotten, even erased. Developers aren’t always conscientious about checking the history of the land they build on.

For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Potter’s Field was seen as an undesirable end, a final verdict of failure and destitution. In his oft-quoted 1950 paper about funeral practices and social class in Philadelphia, Status After Death¹, William H. Kephart wrote:

“...as far as social class is concerned, such fields literally represent the end of the line. Here, generally speaking, lie the social ciphers. Individuals interred at potter's field are stripped of all the symbols which classify them as human beings. They are buried without flowers, without clothes, without graves, and without names.”

Fear of the Potter’s Field meant people paid into burial clubs (sometimes fraudulent), bought life insurance with specific funeral payouts, or sent their families into post-mortem debt. The already predatory funeral industry used the horror of a communal grave to upsell the American Way of Death.

But not everyone can throw money at the problem. The dead, regardless of their net worth, force the authorities into action. An unhoused person can be moved on. A corpse must be collected. New York City solved its bodies on the streets issue by shipping them out to the mile-long Hart Island, which sits just to the south of Long Island. The City bought the island in 1868 and interred the first pauper in 1869 (Louisa Van Slyke, orphan).²

More than a million souls rest on Hart Island, not all of them unnamed. In the mid-1980s, when regular funeral homes refused to handle the remains of AIDS victims, they were buried in single plots by workers in Hazmat suits. Disease compounds the stigma attached to a Potter’s Field burial. More recently, Hart Island was the overflow cemetery for COVID-19 victims, many of them in mass graves. It’s not an easy place to visit, even for those whose relatives are interred there. The remote location is accessible only by ferry on certain dates, which require advance booking.

By contrast, Los Angeles’ Potter’s Field sits at the heart of the city, in Boyle Heights. Evergreen Cemetery was founded in 1877 and, unusually at the time, offered nondenominational burial to all colors and creeds. The City bought several acres as a Potter’s Field and appointed a caretaker, E.H. Cole, at a salary of $50 per month³, who was in charge of collecting bodies from the County Farm and Hospital. From 1896-1924 unclaimed bodies were buried, then the City opted for disposal in its newly built crematorium.

Initially, the funeral arrangements were farmed out to various undertakers around the city, who were paid a flat (and uncompetitive) rate. Now, the annual, multi-faith ceremony is a joint effort arranged Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the Department of Health Services, Decedent Affairs, and Los Angeles General Medical Center. Their staff take care of the unclaimed dead as they’re brought from streets and hospitals. They perform autopsies, doing the delicate work of stripping and bathing a corpse that is sacred to family members in cultures the world over. They note jewelry, tattoos, scars, dental work, any detail that might help with identification. The bodies are stored for 30 days before cremation, then the ashes are carefully filed away for three years. Just in case someone comes forward.

It’s never too late. The nameless are sometimes reunited with their names.

The December burial is the official end to the process, as the care of individuals is relinquished to a higher power, but the County keeps meticulous records for those still seeking a lost relative. It’s not unknown for family members, who may have been searching for years, to find their journey’s end at one of the mass graves.

During the 2010s, dozens of Angelenos showed up at Evergreen on the first Thursday in December to pay their respects. I’ve attended several times. Since the pandemic sent the ritual online from 2020 to 2022, the City has adopted a ticketing system, which has put some attendees off. It shouldn’t. Next year, mark your calendars and look out for announcements. It’s the compassionate, human thing to do, to offer a dignified tribute to strangers who died nameless and alone. We show them they are not forgotten. In a city this size, our lives touch so many others. Their deaths should touch us too.

Press and mourners at the 2024 Burial of the Unclaimed Dead ceremony in Los Angeles

1. Status After Death William M. Kephart American Sociological Review, Vol. 15, No. 5 (Oct., 1950), pp. 635-643 (9 pages)

2. https://www.hartisland.net/locations/city-cemetery

3. BOARD OF SUPERVISORS.: Caretaker Appointed for Evergreen Cemetery. Los Angeles Times; Jan 1, 1896;p.18