Pamela Prickett, associate professor of sociology, co-authored a recently published book, The Unclaimed, telling the stories of people who were abandoned after death in Los Angeles County. Through narrative nonfiction, the book shares the poignancy of the subjects’ lives and deaths, and the heartwarming ways strangers stepped in to provide dignity.

The Unclaimed was named to the “top books of 2024” lists at The Atlantic, BookPage, LAist, and NPR. In an interview with PCM, Prickett shares perspectives on societal alienation and the profound need for connection, offering insights into the importance of reconciliation. (Interview edited for length.)

PCM: You’ve co-written a fascinating book telling the life stories of people whose bodies were unclaimed in Los Angeles County. Who are these people?

Prickett: The unclaimed are people for whom next of kin—usually immediate family—decline to arrange a funeral or burial, cremation or some other form of disposition. When families cannot, or will not, claim a body, it becomes the responsibility of local governments to figure out what to do. Often these governments are resource-strapped and seek the cheapest, most efficient arrangements. In Los Angeles, after 30 days, a body not claimed by family is declared “abandoned” and, unless the person has assets, is cremated by the County of Los Angeles. To give the family extra time, the county stores the ashes for up to three years. At the end of that period, the ashes are interred in a common grave with everyone who died that same year.

PCM: How did you get interested in the topic?

Pamela Prickett

Prickett: I hadn’t thought about it until someone I knew was on the path toward going unclaimed. A quick internet search revealed only a modest selection of news stories about unclaimed bodies in the U.S. A handful were features in the Los Angeles Times about the crematorium and annual burial in Boyle Heights. Once I read about the mass burial, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. How had I lived five miles away and not known about it? So I reached out to Stefan Timmermans, who I had worked with at UCLA, and we agreed to embark on this research project.

PCM: The book is, surprisingly, a page-turner. How did your career background contribute to this?

Prickett: I started my career as a journalist, working mostly in television. That experience helped shape my academic choices, including what I study and how I write. I’m committed to making research accessible to many audiences. For this book, we had the good fortune to have a skilled trade book editor who helped us envision it as narrative nonfiction, reading more like a novel. The result is a set of stories that takes readers into the lives of four Angelenos at risk of being unclaimed. We also meet the volunteers, community members and government workers dedicated to providing burials for unclaimed strangers, imparting a sense of dignity after their deaths.

PCM: The number of unclaimed in Los Angeles is rising. Why?

Prickett: The poor have always been more likely than the wealthy to be buried in unmarked graves and so-called potter’s fields. Today, Americans from all walks of life, including people with jobs and homes and families, who think they did everything right to prepare for old age, are ending up unclaimed. An estimated 2 percent to 4 percent of the people who die every year in the U.S. go unclaimed. In Los Angeles County—the most populous in the country—the number has more than doubled since the 1970s.

Shifts in the rate of the unclaimed tell us something fundamental has changed in what Americans are willing to do for their relatives—and it’s far less than in past generations.

PCM: A key commitment among members of the military is to leave no one behind. How is a group of veterans in Southern California acting on that commitment on behalf of unclaimed veterans?

Prickett: This is one way the research has revealed unexpected and heartwarming surprises. Every Wednesday, rain or shine, a group of motorcycle-riding veterans and their supporters, calling themselves Veterans Without Family, gather at Riverside National Cemetery to bury unclaimed veterans. The group takes on the role of surrogate relatives to draw attention to society’s neglect of veterans and express solidarity with their veteran “brothers and sisters,” who were often estranged from their biological families.

PCM: You also write about a group in Boyle Heights who gets together to mourn those they never knew. What motivates groups such as these?

Prickett: I attended that ceremony for the first time in 2015 and was forever changed. It felt incredible to be surrounded by people who were willing to take time out of their busy schedules to honor people they never knew. It’s a 35-minute interfaith, multi-lingual ceremony organized by a hospital chaplain, a man who walks the walk on radical kindness. By the end, you’re reminded that there is more good than evil in the world and that there is a space to create dignity and humanity for all.

PCM: What can we do as a society to reduce the alienation that too often results in people being unclaimed?

Prickett: The Unclaimed is a wake-up call to take stock of what really matters in life—social relationships. The book poses the haunting question, “How much did your life matter if no one close to you cares you died?” A few suggestions:

Reach out and break through social isolation and work to repair broken relationships.

Talk through the discomfort and sadness we often try to numb. Learn to work through conflict.

Before cutting off ties, think about the long-term consequences. While some relationships are indeed toxic, sometimes what we label as toxic is simple disagreement. Conflict is integral to social interaction, and the more we can work to repair fissures, the better off we will be.

We can change laws to create a more inclusive definition of next-of-kin. We rely on centuries-old English common law definitions of family to determine who qualifies as next-of-kin. It’s my hope that we push policymakers to assess the right to claiming based on the quality of the tie, not whether it is by blood or marriage.

PCM: How can we as individuals and communities expand our circle of caring?

Prickett: I encourage people to attend a local ceremony for the unclaimed. Respect in death can be a rallying cry for respect in life. The unclaimed remind us that unless everybody counts, nobody counts.

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I am lying awake in an unfamiliar bed, thinking about success. It is not a king- or queen-size bed, but a double, shared with my husband in a 400-square-foot cottage that I call The Hut. I am lying here, thinking about success, because I have left my home and driven across the country to take up a semester’s residence as the Mary Routt Chair in Writing at Scripps College. It is the bottom hour of the night, and ahead of me lies the long ascent of time toward morning.

The Hut sits a few blocks north of Pomona, where decades ago I was an undergraduate. Much has changed in Claremont, yet much remains the same. Old halls have been torn down, replaced by modern structures, yet the streets still carry the thick smell of eucalyptus. Once I earned my degree I moved on to a working life, to commutes on subway and bus, to corporate work and housecleaning, to graduate school, marriage and children, teaching and writing. I didn’t envision coming back. And yet this return has felt necessary, even preordained, as if the time for a reckoning has come.

Marcia Aldrich ’75

By many measures my return is a sign of success. I have done enough of what I set out to do—be a writer and a professor—to warrant selection to this named position. But I do not feel triumphant. No wreath of bay circles my crown. Just the opposite: I feel as if I’m lying on a bed of nails. Wandering the old campus gardens and courtyards, I meet my younger self, who doesn’t give me a congratulatory wave, passing by on her way to an important appointment. Instead she sits down beside me on the bench under the wisteria and stares into my face, assessing what I have become. Her eyes darken with disappointment. She finds me wanting. What happened? she asks. I thought you would amount to so much more. I thought there would be so much more of you. It isn’t enough, she says.

How slender she is, yet filled with expectation! Could I ever have been so young and fierce and yet so innocent? How her eyes brim with yearning! She’s sure she’s going to do something great with her life; no obstacle will derail her. Little angel, I say, what did you expect of me, and why are you so disappointed?

It is not enough to be a success—there’s always someone more successful. I rarely compare myself to someone who has achieved less. I notice the person ahead of me, not the person behind. I’m focused on the one who won the prize and forget about the people who were passed over. I ask myself how many among us are where we want to be, who we want to be—as if I could argue my way out of the night. There’s always somewhere we want to get, something more we need to accomplish, something to fix. Such dissatisfaction is good, keeps us moving forward. But too much self-criticism can mist our compass, make us lose our bearings. When will the tallying end, this measuring of myself against every other, this measuring myself against myself, this feeling of finding myself wanting?

I’m not sure when it hit me forcefully that I was flawed, essentially flawed, and no regimen of self-improvement would change that, but I’m sure my mother had something to do with it. She did a good job convincing me I was doomed to disappoint, that everything about me required renovation, though back in high school I didn’t realize that I would disappoint myself more than anyone else. I considered having a T-shirt made that said I am a deeply disappointing person because I felt a duty to warn people, to push them away in case they didn’t see my flaws and became attached to me. Any success took me by surprise and seemed a mistake. I waited for the correction to follow—I’d be stripped of the part in the play, the teacher would recalculate my A, the SATs would be rescored, the boy would come to his senses and dump me, the college acceptance revoked. Nothing seemed too small to worry about. I envisioned a grand tribunal sitting in golden chairs in the night sky, glaring down through my windows and judging me. The tribunal was made up of ancient women with white hair falling past their shoulders to their knees, who would ask in hushed voices: What did you do today? What do you plan on doing tomorrow? Will it be enough?

Enough. A word like a high mountain I can’t cross to see what’s on the other side—perchance a valley of milk and honey where every woman has plenty of what she needs and what she wants and knows she has reached her paradise. She’s satisfied—she doesn’t hanker after what hasn’t been done. Enough. What’s enough for me may not be enough for you. I may have wanted to tell my mother and a whole line of mother substitutes that I’d done enough, but I didn’t because I knew my mother would say, No, you haven’t and I wasn’t sure that she wasn’t right.

Enough can’t be precisely measured, precisely stated because it’s part of an emotional economy. One has to guess, make an estimate. How many hours of work is enough to consider myself productive? How much love is enough to feel loved? How many kisses are enough to feel kissed? How much money is enough to feel secure? Whatever scheme of measurement used, the evidence suggests it is the rare woman who has enough of anything, who doesn’t want more money, more love, more time, more kisses. And in my world it is the rare woman who doesn’t taunt herself because she hasn’t accomplished enough, who isn’t lying awake at night making yet another tally.