FTC Proposes New Guidelines for Collecting Debt from Dead People
Ylan Q. Mui, The Washington Post (November 22, 2010)
The Federal Trade Commission is seeking to revise the protocol surrounding two of life’s touchiest subjects: debt and death.

Are Cemeteries the New Safe Investment?
Patrick Collinson, The Guardian (October 16, 2010)
With a shortage of space in cemeteries, private operators claim there are healthy returns to be had by buying burial plots

Here are a couple different angles on the economics of modern death. The top article examines the ever expanding world of debt collection from the dead. Here is the key passage from the Washington Post article:

The rise in debt collection has spawned a niche market devoted to recouping money from those who die with unpaid bills. The FTC began investigating the practice several months ago and found confusion among collectors over whom they were allowed to contact and what they could say, said Joel Winston, the agency’s associate director of financial practices.

“The debt doesn’t disappear when the person dies,” he said. “It’s still a valid debt, and the collector can still collect it.”

But the question is: From whom?

The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act limits the people that collectors can contact to those with authority to pay the debt – typically a spouse or family member, and possibly a third-party executor of an estate. But in a proposed policy statement, the FTC said changes to court procedures have widened the pool of those who may be able to pay to include a host of other legal representatives.

The Death Reference Desk has been covering various aspects of the postmortem economy so these debt collection issues come as no surprise. An entirely different side of these economic concerns is the money that some investors are pouring into life-insurance policies. Meg wrote about that situation here. And everyone can read about the economic problems people face with death and dying under our insurance tag.

Some of the earliest death and the economy articles that I followed, involved unclaimed bodies filling morgues. These aren’t unidentified bodies, rather dead bodies where the next-of-kin know that the corpse is in the morgue but cannot afford to have the body sent to a funeral home.

And then there is the Cemetery-as-Investment side of these economic question. The Cemeteryscapes blog did an excellent post on this very topic. The Guardian article at the top also discusses how London cemeteries are becoming possible investment opportunities.

Buyer beware. That’s all I’m saying.

These cemetery discussions reminded me of an early Death Ref post that I did on a cemetery in foreclosure in California.

It was an exceptionally sad story then and remains so today.

Death in the Recession: More Bodies Left Unburied
Alison Stateman, Time Magazine (August 07, 2009)

News stories about unclaimed dead bodies, accumulating in morgues across America, continue to pop up. Death Ref Librarian Kim found this one and I decided to post it. What makes this particular Time article slightly different than the other articles I have already posted on the unclaimed body phenomena is this: it discusses the problem from coast to coast. This is not an isolated, geographically contained problem.

Here is a key quote from the new article:

P. Michael Murphy, Clark County [Nevada] coroner and president of the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners, says he’s seen a definite uptick in the number of indigent burials due to financial hardship in the past several months. “Our investigators are seeing an increase in families who as part of the initial shock they’re going through are verbalizing to us, ‘What am I going to do? I can’t pay the rent. My car is being repossessed’ or whatever. Our finances are at the very limit,” says Murphy. “This problem used to be unique to just indigents who either had no family or were living on the street or homeless. We are now seeing folks expressing this concern who are recently unemployed or their house is in foreclosure, so it’s not just what you would typically think of being an indigent burial.”

“Let’s not forget that this is not just a financial issue,” says Murphy. “The sense that I get from our investigators is that when people are emotionally strapped already [because of their finances], this is almost like the icing on the cake. It sort of breaks their back. It’s hard enough when you’re dealing with the death of a loved one, then add in all the additional social pressures that go along with it, and it can make things seem insurmountable.”

When unprecedented numbers of unclaimed dead bodies stop filling county morgues, then I’ll believe that the American economic recession is in retreat.

Final Resting Place, In Foreclosure
Theresa Vargas and Michael Williamson, Washington Post, (August 4, 2009)

Just when it seemed that news about the US economy and Death could not get any odder (and/or sadder), I came across the following blog post. Two writers employed by the Washington Post, Theresa Vargas and Michael Williamson, run a blog called Half a Tank: Along Recession Road and they are documenting how the recession is altering everyday life. Their posting on an Imperial Valley, California cemetery in foreclosure is both predictable and astounding.

Vargas and Williamson explain:

Graveyards are among the last places one expects to find a foreclosure sign, and yet there it was, in big red letters at the entrance to Memory Gardens Cemetery and Memorial Park. “Cemetery in Foreclosure,” the sign said, followed by the phone numbers of local officials…Life in Imperial Valley was fragile even before the recession, with financial struggles stretched far across this community, but now, it seems, the economic downturn has made even the dead here vulnerable.

Cemeteries in foreclosure are not entirely new but it doesn’t happen all that frequently, either. Usually, cemeteries fall into disrepair because the owners stop the upkeep and/or the living relatives of the deceased have also died and no one comes to the cemetery.

Oddly, the last two days have seen similar cemetery stories in both the Washington Post and the New York Times. On Monday, August 3, the New York Times ran the following article: With Demise of Jewish Burial Societies, Resting Places Are in Turmoil.

I expect that more and more of these cases will pop up in the coming years. Family members die. Money comes and goes. Younger generations are no longer taken to the gravesites.

For what it is worth, I do not think that these stories are all that terrible. I like to imagine what future archaeologists will say when they uncover these abandoned burial grounds.

That, for me, is the future for forgotten cemeteries. We, the living, have no control over what stories our dead bodies will tell.