It is, perhaps, the most sorrowful of journeys: From a cooler at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office to a common trench in an Indiana graveyard, shrouded in green plastic, installed in $30 plywood coffins, stacked and carried in the back of a rented truck.
Then, down a dirt and gravel service road to the cemetery’s almost forgotten fringe. The truck backs up to the trench and the coffins are sent sliding down a metal ramp into the soft earth. With crate hooks, a groundskeeper stabs coffins and sets them side by side, nudging them close with his leg.
This is how they will rest.
Plastic peeks out of the corner of one of the coffins. The purple fabric of a sweater sticks out of the edge of another. Dirty embalming fluid leaks from several.
To almost no one, a minister speaks of the committal, says the funeral service and recites the Lord’s Prayer. A funeral director then scatters a handful of dirt.
“It doesn’t take a lot of money to bury someone but it does take some,” said Rev. Edward Pruitt, who performed the service. “These, I guess they had none.”
Indeed, the 29 people laid to rest with such scant ceremony on this cold April morning had little. If they had family, the family either did not want to arrange for a funeral or could not afford one. Some had no family at all. Others had no name.
They are the county’s unwanted and unknown. Their deaths, in most cases, were barely noted, if noted at all. Their burial, together, was paid little attention, too.
No plaque or stone will mark their graves. Round brass tags, each the size of a half-dollar and stamped with a 6-digit number, are tied to each person’s toe and nailed to the end of a person’s coffin to identify him or her. If ever someone wants to claim these bodies, the numbers will help them.
But no one is likely to claim them. These 29 had been dead for as long as 11 months. Most died over the fall and early winter. One man, who authorities were never able to identify, died in May. In all that time, no one came to claim them.
In some cases, according to officials, the family plans to conduct a funeral and asks the medical examiner’s office to store the bodies until they can make arrangements. Often, though, the family does not have the money to see it through.
Then there are cases where there is no one. The deceased has a name, but the police and the medical examiner’s office cannot find survivors.
Finally, there are those with no names. Fingerprints, blood samples, dental and full-body X-rays are taken to help identify them, and some of that information is entered into databases in hope the police can find survivors.
“We go with the best information we have, but the search isn’t that deep,” said Michael A. Boehmer, the administrative assistant at the medical examiner’s office. “If they have relatives, they either can’t be located or aren’t interested.”
More than 300 people a year from Cook County receive this burial of last resort, a number that Boehmer said has been fairly stable for several years. They are of all ages, of every race and both sexes.
Mostly, though, they are older and poor. Fourteen, according to Boehmer, died in hospitals of natural causes; the 15 others were medical examiner’s cases where the death was suspicious, or it was not attended by a physician. The medical examiner, the law says, must investigate those.
The medical examiner’s office then contracts, through a bid process, for the burials. It pays for them with a county fund designated for the care of indigent persons.
This year’s contract, which calls for the burial of 450 people, pays $70,000: $30.50 for each coffin and $155.56 for each of the burials, said Boehmer.
`The best way we can do it’
Various cemeteries have been used for these pauper’s graves. In the late 1960s it was on the grounds of Oak Forest Hospital. For a time, it was in Willow Springs and Homewood Cemeteries. Now, it is in Gary, at the Oak Hill Cemetery, in the working-class section of the city south of the interstate.
A lumber company in Forest Park-Ockerlund Wood Products-cuts and assembles the rough-hewn coffins in two sizes to the county’s specifications, though some are left with uneven edges or nails showing. Students at a school of mortuary science embalm the bodies.
“This is the best way we can do it,” said Boehmer, an affable man. “It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s something that has to be done. We do the best we can with what’s available. We try to give these people a little dignity.”
But in a society where the inconspicuousness of life is frequently lamented, perhaps it should come as no surprise that the passing of these lives receives almost no acknowledgement, that achieving any semblance of dignity is difficult.
There is nothing to say about these people who are beneath this ground. There is nothing that beckons anyone to the medical examiner’s office to claim any of these people.
In fact, when the truck arrives, the 29 coffins are stacked against the wall of the walk-in cooler. Dozens of bodies lay on shelves around them, covered with sheets.
With white masks over their noses and mouths, the cemetery groundskeeper and three other workers stack the coffins three high on a dolly, then roll them down the hallway to the truck bay. A trickle of embalming fluid drips from them, dotting the cold floor of the morgue a reddish-brown.
The trek to Gary
Clad in a dark suit and bow tie, Charles B. Taylor presides over the loading and the interment with a solemnity that, along with the minister’s brief words, lends these scenes the character of a conventional funeral.
“One never knows what the end of the road is like,” said Taylor. “They have to be dealt with. It’s sad that it is in this way but there probably isn’t another way.”
President of the Taylor Funeral Home in Chicago and the Gary cemetery, Taylor gazes at each coffin, then lowers his eyes slightly as they are wheeled past him. Standing over the trench later, Taylor will scatter the first dirt over the coffins. Then, talking business for a moment as he stands at the edge of the trench, he will describe the burial ground as the cheapest and the least desired in the cemetery. He will call the funeral “money in the bank.”
But in the medical examiner’s office, he just watches-although his more than 30 years in the funeral business prompts some people to come out to shake his hand. Meantime, his laborers go into the cooler a dozen times to bring out the coffins and hoist them into the truck.
The funeral train, such as it is, proceeds slowly under a cloudy sky, along the expressway into Indiana, then to the tree-lined neighborhood where Oak Hill Cemetery is located. It passes through the gates, past the office and on a service road to the back lot.
The trench is about 8 feet wide and 20 feet long; before the morning is over it will be lengthened twice, to more than 60 feet, to accommodate all the coffins.
According to Taylor, the trench is six feet deep. Stand in it, though, and it is clear that it no more than four feet deep. An old drain pipe sticks out of one side.
Hard not to be affected
As the workers lift and slide the coffins out of the truck, then position them in the trench, the sky begins to clear and the air warms. Pruitt arrives for the funeral.
His service is brief, no more than two or three minutes.
Pruitt, who is chaplain at the Taylor Funeral Home as well as at the Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, said he had thought long about the funeral.
“It penetrates you,” he said. “It does. You can’t have that thick of skin that this doesn’t affect you. I hate to think that they had nobody, that they were alone. Then, to be buried in a mass grave like they are. That is truly sad.”
If the sadness of a ritual that has been played out hundreds of times over the years works on anyone, that person is W. Earl Lewis. A clerk by profession, although now a doorman at an apartment building on the city’s Southeast Side, Lewis organizes and presides over memorial services for the unclaimed and the unknown.
Lewis, 45, has been holding the memorial services since mid-1986. This year, the services will be in late May and in the late fall, both at the Chicago Temple.
“The idea that a person could be buried and forgotten-I just couldn’t begin to understand that,” he said. “This is just one way to give some solemnity and dignity to people who might not have had a lot, to show that all lives have meaning.”
It is a task he has made his own and invested with considerable energy. He has compiled records of these burials in an effort to construct some history of them.
He has also tried to make the community aware of the burials, suggesting that such an end is within the reach of anyone, no matter how well-to-do or how powerful.
But on this day, all that is absent. Instead, there is the workmanlike burial of these 29 people: unloading them, pushing and shoving their coffins into place, covering them with dirt until there again is that slight rise along Taylor’s back acreage.
There will be one short respite in the work, however. That is when a hearse from the Taylor Funeral Home pulls along the road to signal yet another funeral.
But this one is different. There is the hearse, of course. There is the black linousine, too, and flowers and white-gloved pallbearers and a family in tears.
