Los Angeles honors 1,457 of its unclaimed dead
They may have died alone, but tradition recognizes them all
LOS ANGELES — They are the forgotten people of Los Angeles — 1,457 people, to be exact. Old, poor, homeless, babies born premature and abandoned.
They may have died alone, but they were buried together, in a mass grave, and were honored together this week in an interfaith ceremony that has been an annual ritual in Los Angeles for more than a century.
On a chilly Wednesday morning, on a green hillside in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles County honored what it calls its “unclaimed dead.”
The county does not have to do this, but the tradition, which dates to 1896, has become a sacred event for the many county workers — coroners, researchers — whose job it is to investigate how people die in Los Angeles. Their work is a long process of figuring out who these people were and if there are loved ones looking for them. Nearly all of the forgotten Angelenos honored this year died in 2015 and in most cases a relative was found but for whatever reason they did not want to claim the remains.
The county keeps a list online of each person’s name, date of birth, date of death and the date of cremation. All were cremated and some lived long lives: Maria Bulgier was 103 when she died; Grace Wetzel, 92. Others have no names. Baby Boy Manor is listed as being born and having died on the same day: Oct. 6, 2015. The county keeps remains for three years, and if no one claims them they are buried in the mass grave and honored with a ceremony the first Wednesday of December.
“Some of these individuals were homeless, many were poor, some were newborn babies, and tragically many of them have no loved ones to grieve for them,” Janice Hahn, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said. “At one point, these people had parents. At one point these people had friends. At one point, these people laughed and loved and cried like the rest of us.”
For a big, sprawling region like Los Angeles County, the ceremony also is an annual exercise in community in a place that can often feel isolating. Some 200 people attended this year.
Stefan Timmermans, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who researches how people die and how communities grieve, began attending several years ago as part of his work. But he has kept attending the ceremony because he found it personally meaningful. “I just find it also very moving and very touching that people come together around this,” he said.
He said the ceremony was “sort of like an antidote to the isolation and alienation you can have in big cities, which is reflected in the many unclaimed, about 1,500 in Los Angeles County every year.”
Phillip Gruber, who works in health services for the county, said he had been meaning to come for many years and finally did this year, “to see how our society finds a way to honor people who have been apart.”
Reflecting the diversity of Los Angeles, there were representatives of many spiritual traditions at the ceremony: Christian, Jewish, Native American, Islamic, Hindu,and Buddhist. A man with an oboe played Bach and a choir sang “Amazing Grace”. Those gathered placed flowers on the grave site, on a plot of land that has long been a final resting place for the forgotten of Los Angeles: More than a decade ago, the century-old remains of Chinese laborers were discovered nearby as workers were digging a tunnel for the extension of the city’s subway.
Elena DeGarmo, a retired accountant, has been coming to the service for several years. “Every life deserves someone to witness the end of it and be a witness that they were here,” she said. “In LA, between homelessness and poverty, people just get tossed away.”
In a column published this week in the Los Angeles Times, Timmermans and his research partner, Pamela Prickett, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, wrote of the anonymous lives of the city’s forgotten. “Their stories won’t be told: family strife, alienation, perhaps addiction, poverty or violence in a big city,” he wrote. “These aren’t happy Hollywood endings,” the column continued. “But at least when these people die, Los Angeles doesn’t abandon them.”