The Forgotten Dead

George Eliot once said “Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.”

This maxim was put to test recently when it was discovered that 300 bodies were dug up at an American cemetery. The graves where not vandalized by misguided youth, they were not desecrated by a racially misguided horde. No, what took place was a calculated business decision by cemetery staff. You see, they needed to make room for new tenants, it was simply business. They needed to resell the plots.

The Burr Oak Cemetery located in Chicago, IL, is known as the final resting place for many in the black community, including well-known jazz celebrities like Dinah Washington, Sonny Cohn and Willie Dixon. The bodies of those dug up were not re-interned to another location in a manner that preserves the sacredness of the grave. The bodies were dumped into a mass grave, and some bones were found among weeds in a remote section of the 150-acre grounds. The decision to desecrate these graves was one of simple business. Nobody was supposed to have noticed. After all, these graves had been abandoned by the living, left unattended and almost forgotten.

This act of evicting the dead from their place of rest brings to mind the operator of a ‘Self Storage’ facility. If the property stored on site is forgotten, and the families don’t maintain payments, the manager simply cuts the pad lock, pulls out the remaining property, sells off the valuables, and tosses the refuse in a landfill. Thus making room for a new tenant.

Many may think that an abandoned grave is fair game, since the dead are long gone, but desecration has no statute of limitation. The act of depriving something of it’s sacred character spiritually and morally is humanly repulsive. But before we sit back and point fingers at those American families that abandoned the dead, and those American cemetery workers that coldly violated the site, we need to look inward.

Cemeteries, here and around the world are few and far between, and our population is growing, and dying in a never ending cycle. The days-gone-by when your family attended one church generationally where the funerals, and burials were conducted by the church body have long gone. These church cemeteries, for the most part, are well kept, usually smaller and the burial records carefully maintained. But for many, internment takes place in community cemeteries or privately run burial grounds where the day to day business of running the grounds is a commercial venture. In those cases, the only people who would really ‘Care’ for the dead, are the attentive living families members. Ground keeping is only a cursory function, and no real special attention is given to those 8 feet under.

In the United Kingdom, Tim Morris of the Institute of Cemetery & Cremation Management wrote a paper on the ‘Reuse of Graves’ for the purpose of envisioning cemeteries as a sustainable community asset. The paper logically identified that the imminent shortage of land in Great Britain as well as the European Union had arrived. They identified that urbanization had encroached the existing sites, and there was a reduced standards of maintenance occurring at older cemeteries, many of which had ceased offering new burial sites. It was concluded that re-internment of older graves could be accomplished by removing, and then digging deeper, and thus stacking the dead. In this manner, desecration would not take place and historical continuity would be preserved.

In Canada, even though we do not have a shortage of public lands, there are cases where cemeteries have been abandoned by rural churches. Urban sprawl have encroached the once peaceful setting of the countryside cemetery. Many an example can be seen in both throughout Alberta, including close to home. These abandoned cemeteries are the plots of the forgotten dead. One such example spoken of, was the ploughing over of a cemetery close to Edmonton many years ago.

In the case of the Burr Oak Cemetery the cemetery manager and three gravediggers were each charged with one count of dismembering a human body, which can net them approximately $300,000 in fines. But the trial has yet to be set.

Alberta Einstein once said that “The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.” In the case of your loved-one who has passed on, the only prevention for such an accident is to be attentive of your family, living and dead. Those who have ventured before you deserve to be remembered and not left in the hands of greed and misguided secular policy makers. So the question really is, “Is there a sacred place you should be visiting?”