The current economic troubles have spawned pictures of streets lined with foreclosed houses, growing homeless populations and people camped out waiting for free exams at health care fairs.
Now a new image embodying the current economic difficulties has surfaced in the Los Angeles Times: overpopulation in the storage facilities of coroners' offices and morgues as fewer people have the money to claim the bodies of their relatives and cremate or bury them.
Claiming the bodies isn't free. In Los Angeles County, just getting them back from the coroner costs $200. Cremation runs around $700 to $1,000. Burial, even with relatively modest trimmings, costs around $7,000. For people struggling to meet the needs of the living, spending on the dead is a low priority, though some use fundraisers like carwashes to get the money.
Last year the number of publicly funded cremations by the coroner's office was up 36 percent (to 712) over the previous year (512). That's the office that deals with murders and other deaths in which foul play is suspected. The morgue deals with other unclaimed bodies. There the number of unclaimed bodies in the first six months of this year was 680, 25 percent more than in the first six months of the previous year.
Lt. David Smith, a coroner's investigator, told reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske, "The families just tell us flat-out they don't have the money to do a funeral." The cost is especially daunting for people who must travel from other states to claim the bodies.
And the problem is not confined to California. Writing from Michigan, P.J. Huffstutter, also a reporter for the L.A. Times, profiled Stephen Kemp, an undertaker who has cremated people at his company's expense—$895 per body—because their families didn't have the money. Kemp showed Huffstutter urns still containing ashes from other hard times: 1931, 1933, 1938.
