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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBodies of the Poor Piling Up at Chicago Morgue
Bodies of the Poor Piling Up at Chicago Morgue
Times are so tough in Illinois that the state and its largest city are having a difficult time burying its poor.
In Chicago, bodies are stacking up in the city morgue because the medical examiner's office hasn't paid for the burial boxes used for the dead who were indigent.
At the office of the Cook County Medical Examiner, the morgue's cooler, built to hold 300 bodies, currently has 500, including a hundred babies. All of the decomposing corpses are too much for the room's ventilation system.
There are so many bodies in there now, they cant keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing Ive ever seen, a source told the Chicago Sun-Times. "I think its sacrilegious."
http://www.allgov.com/Where_is_the_Money_Going/ViewNews/Bodies_of_the_Poor_Piling_Up_at_Chicago_Morgue_120118
Mira
(22,380 posts)it sounds like what I envisioned Baghdad morgues to be like for many many years.
mucifer
(23,576 posts)Our social workers are scrambling trying to figure out how to help families. Public aid no longer
puts money towards funeral costs and it hard to get grants for this. We have a lot of low income families with a member in our Chicago non profit hospice.
KharmaTrain
(31,706 posts)Last year we had a simple ceremony and burial for my MIL and it cost well north of $10k...almost 3 times as much as it cost when I had to bury my parents a decade earlier. I can imagine a combination of these rising costs and the collapse of the economy has made it harder for low income people to give their loved ones a decent burial and have left it for the state to do it...and with disastrous results since they've run out of money as well.
The problems of the elderly...especially those who can no longer care for themselves is a ticking time bomb in our society as costs continue to rise rapidly and more people get older and are in need of services. Yet another reason for universal health care...
Liberal_in_LA
(44,397 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)More spending on the DOD & the MIC will solve that problem.
Cal33
(7,018 posts)is what they (and all of us) are having.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)they even throw our dead soldiers in landfills.
Manifestor_of_Light
(21,046 posts)They're in Chicago, the home of dirty politics.
Capitalocracy
(4,307 posts)"We're human beings!...There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odiousmakes you so sick at heartthat you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop." - Mario Savio
But the machine is being so poorly managed these days that whether or not we actively oppose it, just the bodies of the poor and the marginalized are piling up and gumming up the works.
I don't know, it's late, I'm talking nonsense. But this sort of thing gets to me on a visceral level.
Solly Mack
(90,792 posts)K&R
Laelth
(32,017 posts)-Laelth
justiceischeap
(14,040 posts)I know people have ideas about cremation (I don't want to be cremated) but I wonder if this is a cheaper option for cities to offer...
mucifer
(23,576 posts)justiceischeap
(14,040 posts)to bury your loved one, it's better to cremate than allow the body to decompose in the morgue or better yet, donate the body to science...
Ship of Fools
(1,453 posts)MuseRider
(34,135 posts)No way am I allowing my family to take up precious space to house my decomposing corpse. Not only that but it simply creeps me out to think of putting a body in a box and sticking it in the ground.
What better thing to do than to maybe add a little to one of this countries most beautiful places?
Hassin Bin Sober
(26,347 posts)I say Chaps, can't we just feed them to the living poor?
MinervaX
(169 posts)We need to get laws on the books that make it illegal to be poor. I say, sport, we already got them!
lapislzi
(5,762 posts)I know this unfortunately does not include the poor and indigent.
But, you can pre-pay a funeral trust which insures you against cost increases. My cheap-ass cremation is prepaid, so at least my decedents won't have to worry about how they're going to bear that little expense.
I encouraged Dad and Grandma to do it, and it was a weight off my mind when the sad days came. I just called the funeral director and everything was done.
CTyankee
(63,912 posts)I don't see the point of burial (unless it is a religious one). Cremation is efficient and a whole lot cheaper. My view is that when life goes out of your body, that body is no longer "you." It is the shell that you were once in. Scattering the ashes is a nice thing, IMO (I just hope it is environmentally sound).
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)There is something comforting to me about leaving my actual bones in the earth, like every other critter in nature. Being turned into a mere little bucket of ashes is, to me, like erasing all trace of your own existence on this earth, which makes me weirdly sad.
lapislzi
(5,762 posts)Where you're not treated with chemicals and are allowed to go back to the earth naturally.
http://www.greenburials.org/
I just don't want anyone wasting real estate on my remains. It's too valuable for the living.
TwilightGardener
(46,416 posts)CTyankee
(63,912 posts)as kind of ridiculous. Why put me into an expensive box to putrify? Why not just reduce my body to ashes?
I guess this gets back to what I said about your body just being a shell of who you are. The night my mother died in the hospital, the nurse asked if I wanted to be there when they took her to the morgue of the cemetary. I said no, because I believed she was no longer "there." I sat with her after she died, in the hospital room. and she was "not her." She was gone, as far as I was concerned. She had gone somewhere else, she was not there. Since I didn't know where she was, I thought that her body was just extraneous at that point. I felt she was right in having it cremated. I still do.
The Genealogist
(4,723 posts)Don't know where you are, but when Grandpa died, he wanted his ashes spread on Grandmas grave. We told the funeral director, and he replied that it is illegal in this state to spread ashes, as it is considered a bio-hazard. What we ended up doing is to bury the urn into the ground in a plot next to Grandma's. I suppose that you could just illegally spread the ashes, as there aren't "ash police" about, but we decided not to break the law in this case.
mopinko
(70,268 posts)NNOOTTT the same thing. at all.
former9thward
(32,097 posts)Almost all of the bodies belong to Chicago residents. A job I had in Chicago brought me to the Morgue many times. I have been in the referenced cooler several times.
mopinko
(70,268 posts)have no problem seeing my city binged for things it did. this is not one. this is on cook county, which is a giant, giant mess.
former9thward
(32,097 posts)The question is money mainly, not managerial competence. It costs money to bury people and it has to come from somewhere. I would favor cremation for anyone who does not have a family/friend to step forward and claim the body. That would bring costs down.
MinervaX
(169 posts)but is there any cheap, legal way to dispose of the dead body of a loved one? Driving around out in the country they used to just put pappy in the front yard. Would it be legal to have a funeral pyre in your front yard?
riderinthestorm
(23,272 posts)I believe cremation will run anywhere from $1000 - $2000. You can buy a casket very cheaply elsewhere and save a ton of money rather than going through the funeral home. The funeral home has to accept your choice, including a cardboard casket. Have the memorial service at home or a park or some other place rather than at the funeral home.
LeftinOH
(5,359 posts)specified how they want their bodies to be disposed, the decision should be made for them -on behalf of everyone else.
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)goforit
(12,200 posts)former9thward
(32,097 posts)When I lived in Chicago I worked for a state agency that did workplace safety inspections. I was at the Cook County Morgue many times and was in the cooler described several times. There were always hundreds of bodies in the cooler. One time in the mid-90s the cooler was filled to capacity and they had refrigerated meat trucks full of bodies out in the parking lot. It really stunk there even outside.
The bodies would be in there for so long that workers had to wear helmets when they went into the cooler because arms and legs would fall off the bodies when the racks were touched by the fork lifts.
One time I was going to do an air sample test for chemicals in the air of the autopsy room and when I was setting up the equipment all of the autopsy technicians fled the room because they thought I was going to test for drugs.
mopinko
(70,268 posts)several hundred people died.
cook county government in general is an f'ing mess. but they have some good folks on the board now, and president toni preckwinkle is as good a progressive as there is anywhere. she has her hands full, but she is up to the task.