Pamela Prickett, associate professor of sociology, coauthored a recently published book, The Unclaimed, telling the stories of people who were abandoned after death in Los Angeles County. Through narrative nonfiction, the book shares the poignancy of the subjects’ lives and deaths, and the heartwarming ways strangers stepped in to provide dignity. In this interview, she shares perspectives on societal alienation and the profound need for connection, offering insights into the importance of reconciliation. (Interview edited for length).
You’ve cowritten a fascinating book telling the life stories of people whose bodies were unclaimed in Los Angeles County. Who are these people?
The unclaimed are people for whom next of kin—usually immediate family—decline to arrange a funeral or burial, cremation or some other form of disposition. When families cannot, or will not, claim a body, it becomes the responsibility of local governments to figure out what to do. Often these governments are resource-strapped and seek the cheapest, most efficient arrangements. In Los Angeles, after 30 days, a body not claimed by family is declared “abandoned” and, unless the person has assets, is cremated by the County of Los Angeles. To give the family extra time, the county stores the ashes for up to three years. At the end of that period, the ashes are interred in a common grave with everyone who died that same year.
How did you get interested in the topic?
I hadn’t thought about it until someone I knew was on the path toward going unclaimed. A quick internet search revealed only a modest selection of news stories about unclaimed bodies in the U.S. A handful were features in the Los Angeles Times about the crematorium and annual burial in Boyle Heights. Once I read about the mass burial, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. How had I lived five miles away and not known about it? So I reached out to Stefan Timermans, who I had worked with at UCLA, and we agreed to embark on this research project.
The book is, surprisingly, a page-turner. How did your career background contribute to this?
I started my career as a journalist, working mostly in television. That experience helped shaped my academic choices, including what I study and how I write. I’m committed to making research accessible to many audiences. For this book, we had the good fortune to have a skilled trade book editor who helped us envision it as narrative nonfiction, reading more like a novel. The result is a set of stories that takes readers into the lives of four Angelenos at risk of being unclaimed. We also meet the volunteers, community members and government workers dedicated to providing burials for unclaimed strangers, imparting a sense of dignity after their deaths.
The number of unclaimed in Los Angeles is rising. Why?
The poor have always been more likely than the wealthy to be buried in unmarked graves and so-called potter’s fields. Today, Americans from all walks of life, including people with jobs and homes and families, who think they did everything right to prepare for old age, are ending up unclaimed. An estimated 2% to 4% of the people who die every year in the U.S. go unclaimed. In Los Angeles County—the most populous in the country—the number has more than doubled since the 1970s.
Shifts in the rate of the unclaimed tell us something fundamental has changed in what Americans are willing to do for their relatives—and it’s far less than in past generations.
A key commitment among members of the military is to leave no one behind. How is a group of veterans in Southern California acting on that commitment on behalf of unclaimed veterans?
This is one way the research has revealed unexpected and heartwarming surprises. Every Wednesday, rain or shine, a group of motorcycle-riding veterans and their supporters, calling themselves Veterans Without Family, gather at Riverside National Cemetery to bury unclaimed veterans. The group takes on the role of surrogate relatives to draw attention to society’s neglect of veterans and express solidarity with their veteran “brothers and sisters,” who were often estranged from their biological families.
You also write about a group in Boyle Heights who gets together to mourn those they never knew. What motivates groups such as these?
I attended that ceremony for the first time in 2015 and was forever changed. It felt incredible to be surrounded by people who were willing to take time out of their busy schedules to honor people they never knew. It’s a 35-minute interfaith, multilingual ceremony organized by a hospital chaplain, a man who walks the walk on radical kindness. By the end, you’re reminded that there is more good than evil in the world and that there is a space to create dignity and humanity for all.
What can we do as a society to reduce the alienation that too often results in people being unclaimed?
The Unclaimed is a wake-up call to take stock of what really matters in life—social relationships. The book poses the haunting question, “How much did your life matter if no one close to you cares you died?” A few suggestions:
- Reach out and break through social isolation and work to repair broken relationships.
- Talk through the discomfort and sadness we often try to numb. Learn to work through conflict.
- Before cutting off ties, think about the long-term consequences. While some relationships are indeed toxic, sometimes what we label as toxic is simple disagreement. Conflict is integral to social interaction, and the more we can work to repair fissures, the better off we will be.
- We can change laws to create a more inclusive definition of next-of-kin. We rely on centuries-old English common law definitions of family to determine who qualifies as next-of-kin. It’s my hope that we push policy-makers to assess the right to claiming based on the quality of the tie, not whether it is by blood or marriage.
How can we as individuals and communities expand our circle of caring?
I encourage people to attend a local ceremony for the unclaimed. Respect in death can be a rallying cry for respect in life. The unclaimed remind us that unless everybody counts, nobody counts.