THE UNCLAIMED

An unsettling study of how social fracturing and community breakdown underpin lonely deaths.

America’s epidemic of loneliness has engendered another troubling crisis: a sharp rise in the number of unclaimed decedents. Without a family member stepping up, it falls to local governments to provide a burial or cremation, with the remains usually being interred in common, anonymous graves. Lost souls, nameless bodies, forgotten lives: This is a dispiriting but important story, and sociologists Prickett and Timmermans approach it with both compassion and gravitas. In the U.S. each year, tens of thousands of decedents go unclaimed, but the authors focus their research on four cases in Los Angeles. The reasons for lonely deaths vary widely, although substance abuse, mental illness, and homelessness often play a large part. Many decedents had grown apart from their family and friends, sometimes due to a conflict long past. Others didn’t have much of a support system to begin with, and as they aged, their social circle contracted and eventually disappeared. Prickett and Timmermans look at funeral costs as an element that might discourage family members from claiming a relative’s body and conclude that this is seldom a driving issue, compared to simply not caring. Much of this material is unbearably sad, but the authors do identify some threads of hope, for example the growing trend of neighborhood communities and church groups holding regular funeral services for unclaimed decedents. “Holding hands with strangers around the gravesite of the unclaimed as surrogate family members,” they write, “is an act of forgiveness and hope….Even if it may seem there are other social problems more pressing and worthy of our limited time, the unclaimed remind us that unless every body counts, nobody counts.”

A poignant and disturbing book, researched and written with appropriate sensitivity, care, and dignity.