too broke to bury their dead
 

DETROIT (CNNMoney.com) -- At 1300 E. Warren St., you can smell the plight of Detroit.

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. "Some people don't come forward even though they know the people are here," said the former Detroit cop. "They don't have the money."

Lifelong Detroit residents Darrell and Cheryl Vickers understand this firsthand. On a chilly September morning they had to visit the freezer to identify the body of Darrell's aunt, Nancy Graham -- and say their goodbyes.

The couple, already financially strained, don't have the $695 needed to cremate her. Other family members, mostly in Florida, don't have the means to contribute, either. In fact, when Darrell's grandmother passed recently, his father paid for the cremation on a credit card -- at 21% interest.

So the Vickers had to leave their aunt behind. Body number 67.

"It's devastating to a family not to be able to take care of their own," said Darrell. "But there's really no way to come up with that kind of cash in today's society. There's just no way."


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This is nothing special really. Folks all over the place don't have the cash to pay for their relatives' cremations. Detroit's not special in that regard.

The city pretty much collapsed under its own weight, putting all its eggs in one basket, lead by greedy unions, manufacturers who made crappy cars and corrupt politicians.

This'd be a losing formula anywhere and the city is getting what it deserves. Meanwhile, the South, which is largely anti-union is doing just fine. While UAW plants in Michigan keep closing, new ones are taking their place all over the South.

Michigan can either make the decision to get competitive or it continue to be left behind.

I was going to post something here, talk a little bit about some other stuff going on here right now and then I read Kevin's post and, well.. I just can't even respond to that. Clearly this topic is much too personal to me.

You mind giving that news to the last 6 non-union, Southern native plumbers my Charlotte, NC company just laid off?

If you remove the word "deserves" and replace it with something along the lines of "the city is feeling the impact of these decisions now", what exactly do you disagree with?

It's not like this just happened to Detroit - it wasn't happenstance or bad luck or whatever. The overwhelming majority of this happened by design, which sucks for the people at the bottom rung, because they are paying for the bad decisions of those at the top, but Detroit (both in the sense of the city, and as representative of American auto manufacturers) made some pretty poor decisions in hindsight. Indeed, disastrous decisions - and I'm not sure this is Monday morning quarterbacking, because the rationale given at the time was specious at best, and wishcasting at worst.

I'm starting to think that the Detroit situation is something that just can't be discussed on a board like this.

On one side you have people who don't have a lot of sympathy/empathy for the situation, either because a) they see people and businesses in their own areas that are struggling, or b) they have issues with the way the automotive business was run prior to the collapse.

Then, you have people from the Detroit area who (understandably) are sensitive and a bit defensive about the situation. They have allegiances to the automotive industry, or to the unions, or to some part of the situation.

I'm not saying either side is right or wrong, but I just think it's impossible to have any sort of reasonable conversation about it in this type of forum.

I have no empathy for the Union folks that eat their own businesses alives.

Anyone who participated in the auto Unions helped kill their own industry. They deserve to lose their jobs.

You're old enough to know the difference between statistical fact and anecdotal fact.

We had a bid recently with 27 plumbing companies from 4 different states. You must have 3 bidders to open bids. Three years ago, I spent more time going to bids that didn't get opened than anything else. It's not just my company. It's worse in Detroit, but the South is not "just fine".

organ donors should be buried for free. maybe then, more people would become donors. along the lines of charity and public service, i would rank organ donating up there with any living personal sacrifice.

if someone in my hometown needed money for a funeral the community or a church would take a collection. if they did something notable, heroic, or tragic, they would probably get a "...has set up a fund for the family...donations can be made at Kroger's or any First Fifth Bank."

why do they have to cremate the bodies in Detroit? can't they just get a pauper's funeral? it's dignified and inexpensive. not just a cardboard coffin and a hole in the ground.

From my experience in dead relatives, cremation is much cheaper, the cheapest option of all. Burials require a plot, a casket, and workers to dig the hole and refill it. Cremation can be done for much less and the storage isn't as much of an issue (scattering or given to a relative). Columbariums (a crypt for ashes if you will) cost money because well, space is at a premium and it costs a lot.

However there are many hidden costs with cremation. We had to pay for a container for my dad (we had no viewing) and a cardboard box was something like $85 in addition to the cost of the urn, picking up his body (he died at home with hospice care), the actual fire, the scattering, and so on. We went with the cardboard because he'd be mad if we wasted money, he had that kind of sense of humor, and umm yeah, we were setting it on fire!

In a big city it definitely costs more for a burial as there isn't land. I can't think of any place non-military one can be buried in San Francisco, and those spots are running out. There are whole suburbs full of cemeteries, where there are towns with more dead than living.

I suppose it depends on what you're doing and what part of the South you're in. The fact of the matter is that domestic manufacturing is getting the hell out of hostile places like Michigan and going to places where it can actually be profitable. Plumbers and pipefitters will, I'm sure be indirect beneficiaries of that move if they are fortunate enough to be close to the new plants.

It's not about Detroit being "special in that regard." Honestly your post is disgusting. I'm not from Detroit, but I feel a great amount of sympathy for that kind of situation. It must be heartbreaking not to be able to afford to bury a loved one. The sad thing is that so many people feel the way you do which is what is truly wrong with society today. This post says a great deal about you and none of it is good.

Yeah. I can certainly understand that.

For once can you leave politics and crap out of this? Do you have the ability to look at ANYTHING form just a plain humanistic point of view?

Sonia Sotomayor was right...