A Certain Kind of Death (2003). Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock New York: Wellspring. DVD / VHS documentary. http://www.acertainkindofdeath.com Find in a library

What happens if you die and there are no friends, no family, no spouse — no one — to dispose of your body, arrange your funeral, attend to your personal effects or take care of any number of the details of your demise? Unknowingly, you kick off a chain of events, procedures and protocols that may or may not be compatible with your “last wishes”, for you enter the status known as “no next of kin”.

A Certain Kind of Death, 2003, is an amazing piece of documentary filmmaking. Given unprecedented access to the processes that go on behind the scenes when someone with no next of kin dies, the filmmakers present a stark and moving portrait of this “certain kind of death”.

From the film’s website:

Unblinking and unsettling, “A Certain Kind of Death” lays bare a mysterious process that goes on all around us: What happens to people who die with no next of kin? Filmmakers Blue Hadaegh and Grover Babcock present this dark milieu in surprisingly composed and beautiful scenes. We witness a variety of public employees handling the bodies, personal property and money of those who have died alone, each worker helping nudge the deceased into non-existence. As each life is revealed to us, each is also drawn inevitably toward the same vanishing point. Crews haul away property, crypt workers prepare bodies for disposal. Appliances, furniture and personal knickknacks of the dead end up in a county warehouse, where auctioneers disperse them to strangers who know nothing of the prior owners. Unexpected ironies and compelling imagery force us to ponder the question “What is death?” For the unmourned people we have come to know in the film, it is total erasure.

Coincidentally, an article in the Oregonian tackled this exact subject just days after I viewed the film. A video embedded in the article shows an employee of the state medical examiner’s office explaining how he searches for next of kin.