Yesterday we did an episode on death, and I opened it by admitting I'm superstitious about the whole subject. I said I almost didn't want to do it. Then I did it anyway, which is what I say every time, and it's true every time.
And today we're going further in. Not out.
Further in. Daniel sent this one, and he leads with the same confession, that he's superstitious, that yesterday made him uncomfortable, but that the whole ethos of this show is that nothing is off-limits. So he wants to look at how being properly buried, traditionally, professionally buried, has fluctuated over time and from country to country. What informal burial has actually looked like when nobody's there to arrange anything. Why a respectable burial was a genuine life aspiration in the ancient and medieval world. The religious duty to bury a stranger, which in Judaism has a name, the met mitzvah. Whether improper disposal is still a public health crisis, and the emotional crisis for destitute people who have to contemplate things the rest of us never will.
He also asked us to say, up front, that this one may be distressing. So: this one may be distressing. If you'd rather sit this out, skip it. We'll be here tomorrow with something cheerier.
That's the heads-up. Now, the strangest part of his framing is that a normal funeral was once something you aspired to. Not mourned, not arranged. Aspired to. As in, it was a thing you might not get.
And that's where I want to start, because the intuition is right but the timeline is wrong. The shame attached to a bad burial is not ancient and timeless. It's modern, and we can date it.
Date it how precisely?
Thomas Laqueur wrote an essay in 1983 called Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals. His finding is that the poor had been buried at parish expense since at least the fifteen hundreds. That part is old. What's new is the stigma. The pauper's funeral only became shameful somewhere between roughly seventeen fifty and eighteen fifty, and the reason is that social standing shifted from inherited status to acquired wealth. Once your position in the world was something you bought rather than something you were born into, the funeral became a display. Before that window, in Laqueur's words, there was almost no relationship between the wealth of an ordinary person and the costs of their funeral.
So the aspiration Daniel's reading out of the Talmud isn't the same aspiration we have now. One is "please let me be buried at all." The other is "please let me not look poor while I'm doing it."
Exactly that split. And the second one is the recent invention.
There's a second reframe I want to get on the table early, because it surprised me. The public health angle. The thing everybody knows is that unburied bodies cause epidemics.
That belief is partly myth. A 2004 study found that health risks from dead bodies after natural disasters are relatively limited. The urgency of a mass grave depends on conditions. In winter, fewer flies, less risk of dysentery, diarrhea, diphtheria, tetanus. So the reflex to bulldoze bodies into a pit for epidemic reasons is often doing something else. It's doing logistics, or it's doing disgust.
Which is worth holding onto, because it means the crisis we're describing today is mostly not a disease crisis.
It's a dignity crisis, an ethical crisis, and a money crisis. Which are harder to photograph.
So if the shame is modern, what did the pre-modern world actually do with its dead?
Buried them, mostly. But not the way we picture it. Intentional burial goes back about a hundred and twenty thousand years. The interesting leap is the Natufian culture in the Levant, roughly fifteen thousand years ago. They built stone-constructed graves in designated burial sites. That's the earliest evidence of people putting real effort and resources into a grave, and the argument in the literature is that doing that required a robust social network. Collective effort, shared ritual. You don't build a stone grave for one person on your own.
A grave as evidence of a functioning community. That's a nice inversion.
It's the same logic as a cathedral. The building tells you about the builders.
Now, communal burial. I want to make sure we don't treat mass graves as a failure state, because for most of history they were just the state.
They were the norm. Mass or communal burial was common practice right up until Ludovico Brunetti developed a dependable crematory chamber in 1873. That's the hinge. Before you can reliably reduce a body to ash, your options are a plot or a pit, and plots run out.
Rome.
Rome dumped the poor and the waste into mass graves called puticuli. Same word doing two jobs. Garbage and people.
Paris is the case study I'd put on the board, because it's crisis to reform in one city.
The Cimetière des Innocents alone held something on the order of six million dead. Six million, in one churchyard, in the middle of a city. Louis the Sixteenth closed the Parisian cemeteries. The remains were moved underground and became the Catacombs of Paris. And burial moved outside the city limits, to what is now Père Lachaise. That's the template every city has followed since. The dead get moved to the edge.
And the religious denial of burial. This is the part that makes Daniel's aspiration framing concrete.
The stillborn and the unbaptized were for centuries denied burial in consecrated ground. That's not a fringe practice, that's centuries of official policy. And the striking line from a 2022 paper on it is that lay community compassion and mercy often far exceeded the Church's norms. Ordinary people were sneaking these children into holy ground against the rules.
The institution draws the line, the neighbors erase it.
Which is a pattern you see everywhere in this subject.
Then there's the workhouse. Charles Lamb, eighteen eleven. Nothing tended to keep up in the imaginations of the poorer sort of people a generous horror of the workhouse more than the manner in which pauper funerals were conducted.
Which tells you the pauper's funeral wasn't just a bad end for the deceased. It was a public degradation of the survivors. The family had to watch it.
And the law eventually caught up. English common law first recognized the dead's right to a dignified burial in eighteen forty. Rex versus Stewart.
Eighteen forty. So the legal right is younger than the telegraph.
Let's go east, because the geography question is where the fluctuation gets sharpest. Land-scarce Asia.
In a lot of East Asian cities, planning agencies deliberately reduced the space allotted to the dead in order to free land for the living. That's not an accident of crowding, that's a decision. It drove a shift from burial to cremation over decades. Then the columbaria, the buildings full of niches, themselves became overcrowded. Which spawned sea burials, woodland burials, and, this is the detail I like, online and mobile-phone commemorative rituals. You visit grandma on an app.
The niche fills up, so the memorial moves to a server.
And it's not only Asia. Caribbean burial rituals in Barbados, Haiti, Trinidad, are a documented blending of colonizer Christianity and African spiritual practice. There is no single tradition. There's a hybrid, in every country, and the hybrid keeps changing.
So the answer to Daniel's first question is that the fluctuation is enormous and it's mostly driven by two things. Land, and who's paying.
And a third. Who's allowed in.
That's the historical sweep. Now let's look at what happens when nobody is there to claim the body, and what that means today.
Start with the phrase itself, because Daniel's question about informal burial has a Biblical answer. Potter's field. It's from Matthew, chapter twenty-seven. The field bought with Judas's thirty pieces of silver, as a burial place for strangers. That's the origin of the term. And it became the generic English name for a burial ground for the unknown, the unclaimed, or the indigent.
Thirty pieces of silver buys a field for strangers. That's the whole story of this episode in one transaction.
The scale of these places is what gets me. Hart Island in the Bronx is New York City's current potter's field, and it's one of the largest cemeteries in the United States. At least eight hundred and fifty thousand burials, possibly over a million, across about a hundred and thirty-one acres.
A million people.
Shockoe Hill in Richmond, Virginia, held about twenty-two thousand interments between eighteen sixteen and eighteen seventy-nine. Chicago's Lincoln Park potter's field held over fifteen thousand people, including four thousand Confederate soldiers, and the site is now baseball fields. Madison Square Park, Washington Square Park, Bryant Park in New York, all of them started as potter's fields. You have had lunch on top of one of these.
I have had a nap on top of one of these, which is worse.
Considerably.
Now the religious duty, because Daniel specifically raised the Jewish version and I want to get it right. The met mitzvah.
A met mitzvah is a dead person with no next of kin. And tending to a met mitzvah overrides virtually any other positive commandment. That's the textual weight of it. The framing in the tradition is that this is an indication of the high premium the Torah places on the honor of the dead. So it's not charity. It's an obligation that outranks almost everything else you could be doing.
Which is the direct answer to Daniel's point about a public commandment to care for a complete stranger. It's not a suggestion. It's the top of the stack.
And it's organized. The chevra kadisha, the sacred society, the burial society, does this work. The first modern Jewish burial society was formed in fifteen sixty-four by Eliezer Ashkenazi, and it developed fully in seventeenth-century Italy, with Aaron Berechiah's Maavor Yabbok in sixteen twenty-six.
Walk me through what they actually do, because the ritual is where the egalitarianism lives.
Rechitzah, cleansing. Taharah, ritual purification by water. Halbashah, dressing in tachrichim. Halnachah, placing in the casket. And then, this is the part I find extraordinary, the members apologize to the deceased for any inadvertent disrespect.
They apologize to the body.
They apologize to the person. And the tachrichim themselves are the point. Identical white shrouds for rich and poor alike. They symbolically recall the garments worn by the High Priest of Israel, and they're designed so that rich and poor are buried indistinguishably.
So the tradition's answer to Laqueur's problem is to remove the display entirely. You can't show off at a funeral where everyone's wearing the same thing.
And there are shomrim, watchers, who guard the body until burial. Historically that was against body snatching, vermin, desecration. Now it's an act of honor. But the body snatching part tells you what the practical threat was.
Someone was digging them up. The watchers weren't symbolic.
Not remotely.
Now the public health question, and I want to be careful here because the honest answer is not the dramatic one.
The honest answer is that the epidemic fear is overstated, but the crisis is real. The 2004 finding is the standard citation, and it's now two decades old, so flag it as such. But the direction of it has held up. Dead bodies are not the disease engine folklore says they are.
Then what is the crisis?
Hart Island again, and the numbers there are the argument. Burials in trenches. Babies stacked five coffins deep in rows of twenty. Adults in pine boxes three deep, a hundred and fifty per plot, marked by GPS. One-third of annual burials are infants and stillborn babies. That's down from one-half before New York State's program covered all pregnant women in nineteen ninety-seven. In 2006 there were one thousand four hundred and nineteen burials. Eight hundred and twenty-six adults, five hundred and forty-six infants and stillborn, forty-seven dismembered body parts.
Forty-seven dismembered body parts. As a category. On a form.
It's a line item.
COVID.
Interments jumped from eight hundred and forty-six in 2019 to two thousand three hundred and thirty-four in 2020. And the city had planned for this. A 2008 planning document designated Hart Island for up to twenty thousand bodies in a severe flu pandemic.
They'd written it down twelve years earlier.
They'd written it down. And then AIDS. From 1985, AIDS victims were buried in separate deep graves because it was feared the remains were contagious. There's an unnamed infant buried in the only single grave on the island, marked SC B1 1985. Once transmission was understood, they were moved to mass graves.
So the single grave was the punishment, and the mass grave was the correction.
That's exactly what it was.
The part that I find hardest is the paperwork.
Roughly half of Hart Island burials are children under five. Mothers signed papers authorizing a City Burial, generally unaware of what the phrase meant. A 2009 criminal complaint triggered an investigation.
They signed a form. Nobody told them it meant a trench.
And until 2020 the burials were performed by Rikers Island inmates paid fifty cents an hour. The pandemic forced a switch to contract workers.
Fifty cents an hour to bury the city's dead.
And Hart Island isn't only for the indigent, which is the twist. By the 2020s the interments included a professional ballet dancer, a nurse, a software engineer, a scuba instructor, and an acclaimed musical composer. Notable burials include Dawn Powell, the novelist, Bobby Driscoll, who won an Academy Award as a child, and the composer Noah Creshevsky, who in 2020 requested burial there by his own choice, to protest funeral costs.
A man with a career and a reputation chose the potter's field on purpose, as an argument.
As an argument about what a funeral costs.
Britain does it differently, and I think it's the most instructive comparison, because it's not charity, it's statute.
Local authorities in the UK are legally obliged to arrange a funeral where none is being made. Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, and the National Assistance Act 1948 in Scotland. Around four thousand such burials a year in the UK. Scotland alone did five hundred and forty-nine in 2015, costing about five hundred thousand pounds. The average cost of a public health funeral in 2011 was nine hundred and fifty pounds.
So the state has accepted the met mitzvah. It just doesn't call it that.
It's the same obligation with a different name and a much worse ceremony.
And then there's the pipeline nobody talks about. Anatomy.
This is the uncomfortable modern echo of the whole episode. In West Africa, a 2025 study found that sixty-three percent of bodies used for medical education came from unclaimed or unidentified sources. Sixty-nine percent of those came from health facilities. Only two institutions, both in Ghana, had body-donation programs.
So the medical students are learning on the unclaimed.
Globally, unclaimed bodies remain the main or exclusive source of cadavers in most countries. Twenty-six percent main, thirty-one percent exclusive, against thirty-two percent relying exclusively on donation. Nigeria uses the bodies of executed persons.
Executed persons. The state kills them and then the state hands them to the anatomy lab.
And the ethics literature has turned on this. A 2025 paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, titled Grave Injustice, argues the practice is unethical. Disregarding autonomy and consent, harming individuals and groups, and threatening public trust in medicine. A 2019 survey found twelve point four percent of responding US medical schools reported possible use of unclaimed bodies. And a 2025 study found only thirty percent of students considered dissecting unclaimed bodies ethical, while forty-seven percent did not.
The students are more uneasy than the institutions.
Consistently. There's a 2020 piece in the New England Journal of Medicine titled simply An Unexpected Education, Unclaimed Bodies in the Anatomy Lab. The discomfort is the education.
Now the emotional side, because Daniel asked about that specifically and the numbers don't capture it.
The Hart Island Project. Founded in 1994 by the artist Melinda Hunt. It helps families find relatives, arranges grave visits, and runs something called the Traveling Cloud Museum. An interactive map where people add stories, photos, and epitaphs to the anonymous dead. And there's a feature called the clocks of anonymity, which measures how long each person lay unidentified.
How long they were nobody.
Thomas Laqueur wrote that Hunt has researched for years in order to publish the names of as many as eight hundred and fifty thousand paupers who lie in a hundred and one acres of Hart Island where the city buries its anonymous dead.
And access. The access is part of the dignity question.
Hart Island was run by the Department of Correction until 2019, when it transferred to NYC Parks. A Corrections official said in 2016, as long as D.O.C. runs the facility, we are going to run it with the D.O.C. mentality. Family visits were restricted to one weekend a month in 2015, then twice a month.
One weekend a month to visit your mother's grave.
That's the emotional crisis Daniel was asking about, and it isn't the burial. It's everything around it. The paperwork, the visiting hours, the phrase City Burial that nobody explained.
The religious duty to bury strangers is one answer to the question. But what happens when the state, not the synagogue, is the one doing the burying?
You get the obligation without the ritual. Which is worse than either alone.
That's the public health picture. But there's an emotional crisis underneath it that the numbers don't capture.
Hilbert: Four hundred and twelve.
Four hundred and twelve what?
Hilbert: Names. I was a night-shift dispatcher for a municipal coroner's office for about a year and a half. The coroner. The elected one. Part of the job was calling next of kin to ask whether they'd claim the body, and if they wouldn't, explaining what would happen instead.
That's the phone call we've been describing all episode.
Hilbert: The hardest part wasn't the bodies. You get used to the bodies. It was the phone calls. Because the families who couldn't claim the body almost never said we don't want them. They said we can't afford it. And then they apologized to me. A stranger on the phone at two in the morning. They apologized for not being able to afford their own relative's funeral.
That's the Laqueur point with a voice attached. The shame is doing the work.
Hilbert: I kept a notebook of the names I called about. Still have it. Never opened it. I know exactly how many names are in it.
You know the number but you've never looked.
Hilbert: I know the number. It's in a drawer. I'm not going to open it on air.
No. Fair enough.
Hilbert: Anyway. I'm due at the pharmacy before it closes, and there's a queue, and I'd rather be early in it than late.
The Talmud's question was who is responsible for the stranger's body. And we've spent this whole episode watching institutions answer it badly. Cities burying the poor in trenches. Medical schools taking the unclaimed. States doing it by statute with a nine-hundred-and-fifty-pound budget. And then somewhere in a drawer in Jerusalem there's a notebook with four hundred and twelve names in it, and that's the version where somebody actually had to make the call.
One forward-looking thought, and then we're done. As land gets scarcer and funeral costs keep climbing, the line between a respectable burial and informal disposal is going to blur for a lot more people than any of us would like to admit. The met mitzvah and the public health funeral and the trench on Hart Island are three answers to the same question, and the question isn't going away.
Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop.
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