L.A. County: Bringing dignity to death

It took only 12 minutes Wednesday to memorialize the lives of 1,639 people who share a fresh grave at the Los Angeles County Cemetery and Crematory, their cremated remains packed in individual plastic boxes beneath a layer of dirt.

Five chaplains, joined by a smattering of mourners and an unusually quiet contingent of media, stood in the sun, offering prayers that promised an eternal life kinder and richer than the mortal one that ended with a burial plot marked not with the names of the dead but only the year they died: 2008. They are here because they were poor or their remains were unclaimed — or both — and they died in Los Angeles County. Despite the anonymity with which they were buried, they are not unknown; county authorities have identified them all.

County officials have been carrying out these burials since the late 19th century. Interfaith services have been conducted for decades.

The chaplains, who read from various spiritual texts, are usually the only people at these services who may have spent time with some of the dead as they lay dying. The chaplains may have sat at bedsides in county hospitals, heard stories of family members who hurt them or family they hurt. Whether at a hospital or in the hillside cemetery, the chaplains serve as the family that sees the ailing from life to death.

“None of the five elements can destroy the soul,” intoned Rambhoru Brinkmann, a Hindu priest and chaplain educator, reading from the Bhagavad Gita. “…Death is only the gateway to a fuller life.”

When the unclaimed dead enter the Los Angeles County system, their bodies are kept until the public administrator does a full investigation, searching out family members, and declares the case closed. Then the bodies are cremated. By policy, the remains are kept for two years, but a backlog means they are actually stored for three years before being buried. Depending on whether the person died in a county hospital or not, it costs from $352 to $466 for a family member to take possession of the ashes. Sometimes relatives are contacted and they simply do not have the funds to claim the remains. However, if family members discover after the fact that a loved one has been buried in the cemetery, county authorities allow them to have a marker with the deceased’s name and dates of birth and death placed near the grave marker — rather like an annotation of the collective grave.

Generally, few elected county or city officials are present at these services. Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, who sometimes attends, always sends flowers; some of his staff members usually come to the services as well. This year, his beribboned bouquet of yellow and white flowers sat atop the grave site. Although it would be nice if other county officials chose to attend, this is an occasion to contemplate the words of the chaplains and the silence of the dead, not the politics of the living.

As lamentable as it is that there is a need for this ritual each year, it is a credit to the county that services exist to take care of the dying in county hospitals, to store their remains for several years before burial and then, finally, unashamedly, to conduct a public ceremony in daylight.

The number of deceased sent on their way at this service doesn’t change much from year to year. And there may be no county laws or programs that can dramatically lower that number. These are “disconnected people, and society can’t piece them all together,” says Chris Ponnet, a Catholic priest who conducted the service this week and is the director of the St. Camillus Center for Spiritual Care.

A family rift can be a problem beyond an easy fix. But this small ceremony should spur everyone, particularly during a season of holidays and an old year giving way to a new one, to think about mending relationships with people we consider our family, whether by birth or by friendship. As Ponnet says, there is no special social program that can dissolve loneliness and anger or undo a lifetime of bad choices. But through volunteer work in a neighborhood, in a charity or other nonprofit, individuals can reach out to people in need. County officials giving people dignity in death should remind us to offer as much dignity, if not more, to the living.