“A work of grace . . . Both cleareyed and disturbing, yet pulsing with empathy.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?
In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.
The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.
Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring—in death and in life.
“A work of grace . . . Both cleareyed and disturbing, yet pulsing with empathy.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potters’ fields—a Dickensian end that even the most hard-pressed families tried to avoid. Today, more and more relatives are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Up to 150,000 Americans now go unclaimed each year. Who are they? Why are they being forgotten? And what is the meaning of life if your death doesn’t matter to others?
In this extraordinary work of narrative nonfiction, eight years in the making, sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans uncover a hidden social world. They follow four individuals in Los Angeles, tracing the twisting, poignant paths that put each at risk of going unclaimed, and introducing us to the scene investigators, notification officers, and crematorium workers who care for them when no one else will.
The Unclaimed lays bare the difficult truth that anyone can be abandoned. It forces us to confront a variety of social ills, from the fracturing of families and the loneliness of cities to the toll of rising inequality. But it is also filled with unexpected moments of tenderness. In Boyle Heights, a Mexican American neighborhood not far from the glitter of Hollywood, hundreds of strangers come together each year to mourn the deaths of people they never knew. These ceremonies, springing up across the country, reaffirm our shared humanity and help mend our frayed social fabric.
Beautifully crafted and profoundly empathetic, The Unclaimed urges us to expand our circle of caring—in death and in life.
Critiques-
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December 15, 2023
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.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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January 29, 2024
Sociologists Pickett (Believing in South Central) and Timmermans (Postmortem) offer a compassionate if somewhat shortsighted account of Los Angeles County’s “unclaimed dead.” Investigating the bureaucratic process triggered by death, the authors argue that it is mainly “deep estrangement” from family that leads to remains going unclaimed. Among other such cases, they profile David Spencer, a U.S. Navy veteran who died in 2017. His most closely related family, with whom he had not been in contact for nearly two decades, were told they had to pay out of pocket to transfer David’s body to a funeral home (the legal threshold of “claiming”) before they could process his estate or petition for a free military burial. They declined, and David was buried by the county, his funeral paid for from his savings. His relatives didn’t attend the service but inherited the rest of his estate, which a county bureaucrat interprets as a sign of their callous indifference, discounting their claims of poverty and disability. The authors unsatisfyingly conclude in tacit agreement with this perspective, advising readers to keep in touch with family to avoid an “unclaimed” fate (“We hope that you are not estranged from loved ones.... Make sure your loved ones know you care”), rather than highlighting needed reforms of a dysfunctional government process. It’s a moving slice of life with a dispiriting takeaway. -
March 29, 2024
In the U.S., roughly 150,000 dead bodies go unclaimed each year, and that number is rising. Sociologists Prickett (Univ. of Amsterdam; Believing in South Central) and Timmermans (UCLA; coauthor, Data Analysis in Qualitative Research) explore the question of a life's value when the deceased remain unidentified, sometimes abandoned, and left for local governments to dispose of. The authors use four people as case studies to investigate how this can happen. They conclude that when a body is found, sometimes no one ever sorts through public records to determine who the person is. There's also little to no evidence of attempts to find people who might be able to identify them. The authors believe that the fracturing of families, the lack of connection, unresolved solutions to reducing the significant number of unhoused people nationwide, and many other social ills contribute to this situation. Noteworthy is their mention of how hundreds of people show their care for humanity for others by gathering once a year in Boyle Heights, CA, to mourn and bury unidentified people in the area. VERDICT This title urges readers to care (in life and in death) about the disturbing number of Americans who go unclaimed each year.--Claude Ury
Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
