For the Homeless and the Indigent, Dying is a Lonely Business, Done Without Ceremony
Most of us know that when we die, we can expect someone to oversee the
disposition of our bodies. Even if we never discuss death and make no
advance plans, we can probably count on a spouse or blood relative to
make arrangements for a funeral and a burial or cremation.
SHADY OAKS GARDENS, the county-owned cemetery near Homeland, is nearly
filled with a multitude of John and Jane Does. Cremation has largely
replaced traditional burial to dispose of the indigent —it’s cheaper.
When people die unable to pay for a funeral, they are usually cremated
at county expense and their ashes are stored in a cardboard box, as seen
at Oak Ridge Funeral care in Winter Haven. The $575 burial budget often
doesn’t cover all the expenses.
Not Sheldon Imbler. When Imbler died of liver failure March 10 at
Lakeland Regional Medical Center, he had no one to mourn him. Imbler,
57, had been living on the streets of Lakeland for at least two years
and had no family in the area.
And so the responsibility for dealing with his remains fell to Polk
County — specifically, the county’s Department of Health and Social
Services. After a search failed to find any next of kin, the county paid
a Winter Haven funeral home $575 to have Imbler’s body cremated. He had
no funeral or memorial service, and the crematory arranged to have his
ashes scattered in the Gulf of Mexico.
‘Two things are guaranteed in this country — one is a public education
and the other is a proper burial,’ said Russell Moline, a funeral
director at Lakeland’s David Russell Funeral Home, which oversaw
Imbler’s cremation. ‘People are entitled to those two items.’
It’s not just homeless people like Imbler who sometimes require public
burial or cremation. Wilma Daniels, Polk’s health and social services
manager, said the county pays for the disposition of citizens in a
variety of circumstances, including elderly residents who have outlived
all their relatives and people whose families just can’t afford to pay
for burial or cremation.
‘Most people, they don’t want to ask for help,’ said Mary Kondelin, a
senior case manager in Daniels’ office, ‘but due to their economic
situation they have to.’
Daniels said the county paid for 246 dispositions — 157 cremations and
89 burials — in the fiscal year from October 2006 through September 2007.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
She said her office follows a protocol to determine whether any
relatives of the deceased have the assets to pay for burial or
cremation, and it does not approve every application for assistance. The
Florida Anatomical Board, which supplies cadavers to the state’s medical
schools, also has the authority to take unidentified or unclaimed
bodies, though Daniels said that is rare, occurring only three times in
Polk in the 2006-2007 fiscal year.
Daniels said all Polk funeral homes are eligible to handle arrangements
for publicly funded burials and cremations, as long as they accept the
flat $575 payment from the county. Keith Fields, a funeral director at
Oak Ridge Funeral Care in Winter Haven, said that payment hasn’t risen
in years and in many cases doesn’t even cover the cost to the funeral
home of disposing of the body.
‘What they pay for basically barely covers cremation,’ Fields said. ‘A
lot of times we’re doing basically charity work by the time the fees and
the expense of picking the body up and all the running around has to be
done.’
That’s one reason the vast majority of cases result in cremation, which
is less costly for funeral homes. The other is the lack of public burial
space.
The county owns Shady Oaks Gardens Cemetery, a 2.8-acre, triangular
tract near Homeland donated by a phosphate company in 1968. Kondelin
said the cemetery reached nearly full capacity in the 1990s, and burials
there have all but stopped. Kondelin, a 34-year county employee, said
her office has unsuccessfully sought land for another ‘Potter’s Field,’
the traditional name for a burial ground devoted to indigents and
unidentified people.
WITNESSES
Back when the county did regular burials at Shady Oaks, a representative
from the social services office attended each ceremony. Kondelin said
she witnessed many such burials.
‘Sometimes there was family there,’ she said. ‘Sometimes the only people
there were the social worker, someone from the funeral home, the person
digging the grave and a minister.’
Asked whether it seemed sad to see someone buried without any family or
friends to mourn, Kondelin said, ‘There was someone from the county
there that did care about an individual, whether they had a family member or not.
As a social worker, you do have to have a degree of professional
detachment, but you do have to have empathy for an individual because
they were a human being. They were either a mother, father, brother,
sister, child.’
CREMATIONS
County-funded burials do still occur, as the 89 examples from the
previous fiscal year attest, just not at Shady Oaks. Daniels said
sometimes a family owns a cemetery plot, but lacks the money to cover
burial costs. Or she said a friend of the deceased might donate a plot,
or a cemetery might offer a space at no charge.
But Kondelin said cremation has become the dominant form of disposition,
not only in Polk, but in most Florida counties as well. She said funeral
homes do not hold ceremonies for cremations and sometimes ship bodies to
crematories outside Polk, and the county doesn’t send a representative
to cremations.
In cases of cremation, Kondelin said family members have the option of
claiming the ashes. Otherwise, funeral homes dispose of the ashes in any
legal manner they see fit. Moline said dispersal in the Gulf of Mexico
is the most common method.
For people like Sheldon Imbler, who have no family in the area, Daniels
said her office makes every effort to track down the next of kin. She
said the funeral home that receives the body often joins in the search,
checking with nursing homes, hospitals and neighbors and often enlisting
help from law-enforcement officials.
Daniels said there is no statutory deadline for waiting to find a next
of kin. She said she doesn’t recall ever having directed a body to be
buried or cremated only to learn later of a living family member.
‘We give it what we think is a good effort, and that length of time may
vary,’ Daniels said. ‘If we think there’s a relative, we’ll wait a
little longer. We don’t have any set time.’
But she knows that some people, like Imbler, are truly alone as they
depart this world.
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By Gary White, The Ledger, published 3-29-08. Gary White can be reached at gary.white@theledger.com or at
863-802-7518.
