I read recently with near-horror that the Los Angeles Coroner’s office was about to put the unclaimed ashes of over 1,600 people in a mass grave. The horror comes from the fact that the remains of a homeless woman who basically lived in or around our church for nearly 20 years might be among those ashes.

I quickly called the Coroner’s office and was told that Rosemary’s case had been closed more than a year ago. for nearly two years I’d been trying to prod her homeless boyfriend to do something about her body. She did not want to be cremated, he said. But you can’t just bury a whole body, and nobody had the money to buy a casket, a burial plot and the services required to put the body in it. We had contact her next of kin, in the Midwest, shortly after her death from breast cancer nearly two years ago, and while they were saddened to learn she had died—homeless—in Los Angeles, they had about zero interest in paying for a proper burial.

So that matter languished, until I read the LA Times article about the mass burial. I knew that the County has, at any one time, thousands of unclaimed bodies and/or “cremains.” But somehow it seemed like the ultimate insult to an elderly woman who had lived a harsh, cold and hopeless life for many years to simply see her ashes, in a plastic sack, dropped in a big hole.

The County’s administrative office referred me back to the Morgue. More phone calls, more tracing of a closed case. But finally I was told that Rosemary’s cremains would not be buried that week—only the ashes of people cremated more than 3 years ago.

The next step—if prodding her boyfriend (or as he describes the relationship, common-law husband)—is successful, is to go to the Superior Court with an “Ex Parte Petition for

Court Order to Release the Remains of a Decedent” filled out, pay whatever court fees, probably pay for the cremation, and wait for a court date. Is it any wonder so many bodies go unclaimed?

Of course I am thinking of what our society says about the value of a human life. At least the government was planning to bury these ashes with dignity. Somewhere a computer at least has their names and dates of death on record. And is “society” responsible to show respect for individuals whose own families for whatever reason do not claim what is left? One of the most ancient aspects of civilization anywhere is the great respect and care which the living gave to the remains of the dead. Are we becoming far less civilized now?

Maybe the dignity and respect given to each and every human being is not inherently hard-wired into any society or community, but must be secured on a case-by-case basis. In Rosemary’s case, there is a dignified resting place for her cremains here in the church, in a compartment inside the “high” Altar, where three other containers also reside. Two were former church members, and the third one is a total mystery: no one here knows who she was or how the ashes got to this church.

But I reflect on the millions of people who died prematurely of HIV/AIDS. In America we have a wonderful national Memorial Quilt, but what about the human beings, created in God’s image, who died elsewhere in the world.

And what about the teens who have taken their lives because they were bullied, harassed and shamed repeatedly for being effeminate or gay? Their families, I think, have treated them with respect in the sad reality of their deaths, but what of a society that tolerates, even encourages disrespect to gay teens who are living?

The irony of Jesus’ words (Matthew 8:22) of course, is that the dead cannot bury their own dead. But if we are not alive to the reality of people’s lives being discounted, disrespected, or destroyed by the neglect or hatred of others, then we may as well be dead. Those who are truly living value the lives of others as much as their own.

—Pastor Dan