By DAN CROWLEY
Staff Writer
NORTHAMPTON – Police get called to a report of someone who has died without any family or friends nearby. They can’t find any next of kin and, because there’s nothing suspicious, the medical examiner doesn’t get involved. There is no evidence that the deceased person had made funeral arrangements or had the money to pay for them.
What happens next? A funeral director must take the body away and properly store it, while continuing the search for a family member.
If that search turns up no relatives, as is often the case, the funeral director is left with the duty to take care of arrangements that often cost more than the $1,100 the state reimburses them for burying indigent people.
Opening a grave alone in most local cemeteries can cost $700 or $800, not to mention the costs of a casket, vault, and other related fees and costs – for a total cost that can reach as high as $3,000.
The state has not increased its reimbursement rate to funeral directors in 33 years and one long-time funeral director in Worcester plans to urge state lawmakers in a meeting Friday to change the system to ease the financial pinch.
“Unfortunately, it’s the funeral businesses who lose money on this,” said funeral director Michael Ahearn, of the Ahearn Funeral Home in Northampton. “There has to be a way for the state to support the funeral service.”
Ahearn is among a group of funeral directors statewide who have handled the arrangements of those who die alone and penniless. His last such burial was at Spring Grove Cemetery in Florence in August 2012. He used to do more, he said, when the former Northampton Nursing Home near his business was open and where people without any known family occasionally died.
The body was buried in the northeast corner of Spring Grove Cemetery, a section known as Potter’s Field where about 100 or so people without relatives or financial means have been interred over the years. Only a few have grave markers. Under state law, a city or town must provide an area for the burial of indigent people.
“My belief is that somebody should be buried with dignity,” Ahearn said in explaining why he has done the work despite the financial burden. “If I do four or five of these a year, it takes its toll on the business.”
On Friday, Worcester funeral director Peter Stefan is scheduled to meet with aides to Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg, D-Amherst, and Senate Majority Leader Harriette L. Chandler, D-Worcester, in an attempt to get the issue on their radar. His solution is to allow funeral directors and local boards of health to authorize cremations so that deceased people can be cremated, a considerably less expensive process than burial. He said he understands that cremation may not be an option in some religious traditions.
As someone who takes in abandoned bodies on a routine basis, Stefan knows about the financial toll. Last year alone, he said helped the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester dispose of 27 people who died in the hospital without any family to claim them. Stefan serves on the state’s five-member Board of Registration in Embalming and Funeral Directing and has traveled as far as Springfield and Westfield to remove abandoned, unclaimed bodies.
“If the funeral director doesn’t come pick up the body, who’s responsible for it?” Stefan asks. “UMass Medical Center had 27 abandoned bodies last year. They helped us take care of the bill but I don’t think it’s their function to do it. Everybody is talking about this except the state legislators. It’s time for them to step up.”
The cost of cremation is about $350, as opposed to the thousands of dollars it can cost for a burial. Under the current law, funeral directors must perform full burials unless a family member authorizes cremation. In some cases, family members will pay for it; in other cases they don’t take financial responsibility.
Stefan said the number of abandoned bodies is a serious issue that will linger as people without family networks continue to die of drug overdoses, in nursing homes or on the streets. He said the state medical examiner’s office in Boston has been paying funeral directors an additional $1,000 to take cases off their hands as bodies piled up in the morgue.
“They’re still doing that,” he said. “Step number 1, let’s get this thing passed so the bodies don’t build up. It’s that bad.”
It’s also the case that deceased people do have family members, but they just haven’t stepped forward because of the costs involved.
“They’re afraid of a bill,” Stefan said. “They don’t want to deal with it. Don’t have the money.”
Easthampton funeral director Morgan G. Mitchell, of the Mitchell Funeral Home, said he has not had to bury someone without family and cover the costs, but understands the burden the state’s reimbursement system places on funeral directors.
“To bury someone far exceeds the $1,100 the state will pay,” he said, noting that the cost can reach nearly three times that sum. “We have been lucky enough to find a next of kin and had an ability to cremate.”
Mitchell said the issue of cremating a body without a next of kin’s authorization poses liability issues, which is largely why the curent system remains in place.
“If you bury, you can always exhume and cremate afterwards, but by cremating, you’ve taken away that ability,” he said. “It’s a liability issue.”
He said a more mobile society also has exacerbated the time it can take to find a deceased person’s relatives.
Ahearn said it also remains to be seen what funeral directors must do with someone’s ashes if Stefan’s proposal is to gain traction among lawmakers.
“Are we going to a scattering grounds? There has to be a definite record of this in case somebody comes out of the blue,” he said. “It’s a wide open topic.”
Stefan said an earlier law that allows funeral directors to scatter or bury unclaimed ashes after a 12-month holding period covers that question, though the remains of veterans must always to be buried in a state or federal cemetery.
Staff Writer Dan Crowley can be reached at dcrowley@gazettenet.com.