Yakima County’s unclaimed dead to get a final resting place

YAKIMA — The ashes of 85 people sit in cardboard boxes, five urns to a box, in a walk-in cooler at the Yakima County Coroner’s office

The urns — simple, brown plastic containers — are cheap and utilitarian. Each is labeled with the most basic information: name, gender, dates of birth and death, and the funeral home that handled the body.

One of the oldest is Harry Brockwell. Born in 1911 in Tennessee, he worked as a farm laborer in the Yakima Valley before he died at 90. There are a brother and sister born nearly two years apart. Both died shortly after their meth-addicted mother gave birth. One man was a fisherman, another a chef and one woman was a beautician.

With varied lives and deaths spanning more than a century, they share this: They had no money for burial, and no one came forward to claim their remains.

Now, the county will bury them in a mass grave in Tahoma Cemetery sometime later this month or in early November.

The dead deserve a respectful resting place, but for more than a decade the county hasn’t had money for a burial, Yakima County Coroner Jack Hawkins said.

Thanks to help from the city of Yakima, which owns and operates Tahoma Cemetery, and local funeral homes, especially Shaw and Sons Funeral Directors, the county is burying its uncollected dead. They will be buried together under a communal marker. But the county and cemetery will catalog the location of each person.

Hawkins hopes family members or friends come forward to claim remains. But if not, burying them together is better than nothing, he said.

“Before, they were kept in a drawer here or on a rack at a funeral home. It’s a way to give them a final resting place. It’s for respect,” Hawkins said standing beside the stacked urns in the cooler.

Two people, Loretta Whetstone and Ila Faye Dooley, have been waiting since 1994 for burial. They died the year after the Legislature stopped paying to bury unclaimed remains. Most, though, died since 2005. Hawkins is holding onto remains from the last two years in hopes that they’ll be claimed. He plans to open the grave up each year to add remains and take out any that have been claimed.

Indigent deaths make up only a tiny fraction of deaths in Yakima County each year — fewer than 10 out of about 1,700 — but people find them unsettling, he said.

In Washington, a dead person’s relatives are responsible for disposing of the corpse, regardless of income. But if a body is not claimed in 90 days and the deceased doesn’t have money, it falls to the county to take care of it.

Until 1993, the state Department of Social and Health Services paid for handling the corpse, a casket, a cemetery plot, burial and even a small service when the deceased had no money. But the $3.3 million program was lost in a round of budget cuts, according to news reports at the time.

Counties tended to provide only enough money to cover the bare minimum — cremation, said Cameron Smock, past president of the Washington State Funeral Directors Association and CEO of Bonney-Watson Funeral Home in Seattle.

Legally, counties can simply scatter a person’s ashes after cremation and be done with it. But Smock said he doesn’t know of any county that does that.

Funeral homes pick up much of the costs not covered by counties. Benevolent groups, religious organizations and other entities also help.

Sometimes, funeral homes have to absorb all the costs. Some counties won’t pay if any relatives can be located or if the annual budget for indigent burials is exhausted, he said.

That is not the case in Yakima County, according to Hawkins.

Even when cremation is paid for by a county, charity or family, the ashes can end up in storage at a funeral home, Smock said. Bonney-Watson, which started in 1868, has “thousands of cremated remains.”

Some of the unclaimed remains go back to the 1800s, but they won’t be thrown out.

“Some family member may come forward some day and claim them,” Smock said. “And we wouldn’t want to tell them that we’ve disposed of their uncle’s remains and can’t retrieve them.”

Funeral homes go to great lengths to track down even distant relatives, said Kathy Birdwell, general manager at Shaw and Sons Funeral Directors in Yakima.

“What we see in these unclaimed remains, it’s more than just a financial issue. It’s the missing human connections,” she said.

There are many reasons a body goes unclaimed: A person has no relatives or is estranged from them, or the relatives cannot pay to bury the body.

Sometimes, the relatives simply don’t care, said Michael Kearl, a sociology professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Americans have become increasingly separated from the elderly and death, to the point where many don’t want to have anything to do with either, Kearl said. “Abandoned in old age, abandoned in death.”

Many of the 85 people on Hawkins’ list died in nursing homes or hospitals from natural causes associated with old age.

While some people avoid dealing with a relative’s death, the community feels that “there is a basic dignity, and at least they deserve to have their remains in a socially recognized sacred spot,” Kearl said.

Historically, the unclaimed dead in America have received little more than a final resting spot, said Gary Laderman, a religion professor at Emory University in Atlanta.

They were often buried in common, unmarked graves with no service. Before the 20th century, little effort was made to catalog names and locations of indigent burials. The shift had more to do with a rise in bureaucratic record keeping than with greater respect for the abandoned people, Laderman said.

“How we bury the dead and honor the dead reflect social values,” and our treatment of unclaimed bodies offers a mixed picture of our values, he said.

Society often ignores marginalized groups like the poor and many ethnic minorities in life and in death, Laderman said. “The indigent class is the lowest in status, and that is shown in the funeral ritual” or lack of one.