Each year, roughly 1,500 to 2,000 people die in Los Angeles County only to have their bodies go unclaimed by family; the remains are held onto by the county and eventually cremated and buried in a cemetery tucked away in Boyle Heights.
“The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels” by Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans traces the lives of four such lost souls, giving them a humanity and identity in death that was often absent in their lives here.
“We hope that readers will transfer their empathy for those four to all those going unclaimed,” says Prickett, who earned her Ph.D. at UCLA. Timmermans is a sociology professor there.
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The book also follows those whose job is to handle the unclaimed, at the medical examiner’s office, where they try to track down relatives, and at the crematorium and cemetery. The authors spoke recently by video about the book and their experiences writing it. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. This book is not just about the unclaimed bodies but about social isolation and untended mental health issues within a family, community or city. How do you tease all those factors apart?
Timmermans: The commonality here is family estrangement. There are unhoused people and those with mental health struggles and drug addiction and all these things put pressure on family relationships. We see a lot of people with those conditions who do get claimed so what really pushes this story is the estrangement.
Prickett: Some people just become very isolated and their social networks have shrunk over time. There’s one guy we wrote about and no one described him as having mental illness. He was a loner who liked to do things his way. Maybe the larger discussion is about America’s unhealthy obsession with individualism and doing it your own way and what this says about our society and what we prioritize.
Some of this is also about long-term care at the end of life and how many of us are not preparing and saving for old age. The unclaimed are a canary in the coal mine of what the future might look like if we don’t have a social safety net, if we are increasingly estranged and isolated and we keep telling everybody, “You’re on your own.”
Q. You write about people with a church community who would have gladly paid for and held a funeral but it’s always family first. Do we need to loosen rules so that next of kin is not the only option?
Timmermans: The county doesn’t look at the quality of the relationship between the decedent and the relative so they might be asking the wrong person, someone who hasn’t seen Uncle Joe in 20 years is now being asked to organize the funeral while a whole bunch of people who would be willing to bury never get the chance.
Prickett: If we have a wider interpretation of who’s the right person to take on the disposition, to include friends and church communities, that would definitely help, especially in Los Angeles where there’s so much migration. Also, there are people cut out of the legal claiming process because they can’t navigate the bureaucracy – it requires showing up at court during workdays. It’s unnecessary how difficult we make it for somebody who cares to claim.
Q. Why was it important to humanize not only the unclaimed dead but also the people who handle the cremations and who track the next of kin?
I was really touched by the care that the workers at the county cemetery take and knowing that there are still good people in the world made me hopeful, which I’m not always feeling when I look at social media. And the medical examiner’s staff has the toughest job – there’s not a good day in the sense of you’re never going to deal with a good death at the coroner’s office. But they’re professional and likable with interesting perspectives on life and the city. They do this hard work for people who would otherwise not get attention so it’s a good L.A. story. Yes, there’s a complicated, frustrating bureaucracy that needs to be better but the people behind it were inspiring.
Timmermans: They’re unsung heroes – they’re overworked and they’re underpaid, but they add care to it, bringing dignity to a heartless job while they’re under attack from politicians and having their budgets cut. They really try to do whatever is in their power and within the rules to be as caring as possible.
Q. At the end you write about your own personal experiences with estrangement and isolation. How did those influence the book?
Prickett: I came in thinking it’s pretty simple – if you have the money to claim you do. But becoming estranged from a family member really woke me up. It’s just not that simple. It made me much more empathetic to the people we wrote about.
Timmermans: I was in the hospital looking at my phone about who I could call to take care of my dogs and I came up empty. It was a wake-up call. I realized that the pandemic had done a bad number on friendships. I lost a lot of friends – we didn’t keep in touch. That made me realize that these unclaimed are not “them,” they are us. We are just a couple of steps away from going unclaimed. But it’s also a wake-up call because you can change that so afterward I made a deliberate effort to reach out to people and bring us together and turn that ship around.
Q. How would you like to be buried?
Prickett: I used to want to be cremated with my ashes spread in the ocean, but after doing this book and going to cemeteries,I now would like to be buried in a cemetery with a headstone where people who loved me can come and future generations can walk by and wonder who that woman was. I don’t want embalming – I could have a green burial in Inglewood Cemetery or something like that.
Timmermans: I want to be cremated.
Q. I think more about the playlist for my funeral than how or where I’d be buried.
Timmermans: That’s a gift too. Your playlist reflects who you are, and becomes a prompt for other people to think you and keep your memories alive. But you need to be able to trust that someone’s going to play that playlist.
Prickett: The No. 1 song for me would be Paul Simon’s “Graceland.”
Timmermans: When I heard them play taps at veterans’ funerals, it offered a mournful solace. My son is a trumpet player so I really hope he will play it at my funeral. I’ve already talked to him about it, but he’s 19 and thought it was kind of weird and hasn’t been indulging my morbid fascination with it.
Q. For you is there a spiritual issue about what happens to the unclaimed or is it less about what happens to the body itself?
Timmermans: It’s a moot point for you because you’re no longer there, but it’s a gift to your people left behind. Working on the book I became much more convinced that we live on in the memories of others. It’s a final testament to the life you lived that people are willing to come together and mourn you. You’re making a gift to these people left behind by having a funeral and by articulating what you want.
Prickett: A funeral is bigger than the individual who died. It’s a moment of collective grief, of shared emotion, not just honoring the life of the person who died but thinking about the people who remain and how they’re connected.
Timmermans: Even for the unclaimed in Los Angeles when people who are strangers burying strangers at the mass funeral it can be extraordinary and powerful to bring humanity and dignity to these people who are invisible in their life. Giving that little honor can be meaningful.
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