Waging a Final Battle for Forgotten Vets

The cremains of those who served in the armed forces sit languishing on the shelves of funeral homes, a sad scandal as we mark Veterans Day this month. But an unlikely army of supporters — bikers — are determined to identify the departed and give them a dignified send-off

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Illustration by Craig LaRotonda

Throttling down, Jim “Bingo” O’Donnell pulls his lava-red Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic bike into the parking lot of a funeral home in western Wayne County, then smoothly glides to a halt. He kills the 1450-c.c. engine, drops the kickstand, and pops off his old-school shorty helmet. Moments later, he is strolling through the building’s heavy white entrance door and into the spacious and finely appointed reception area — a man on a mission.

hrottling down, Jim “Bingo” O’Donnell pulls his lava-red Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic bike into the parking lot of a funeral home in western Wayne County, then smoothly glides to a halt. He kills the 1450-c.c. engine, drops the kickstand, and pops off his old-school shorty helmet. Moments later, he is strolling through the building’s heavy white entrance door and into the spacious and finely appointed reception area — a man on a mission.

With a tight smile, Charlene answers what questions she can from the two drop-ins. Later, out of earshot, she mildly criticizes their approach. “Normally, somebody has an appointment,” she says. “But someone who I don’t know from Adam just walks in and says, ‘Have you got any cremains?’ and starts asking a lot of questions and handing me all this material. Meanwhile, I’m trying to get a family ready for visitation.”
O’Donnell is nonplussed. “We prefer a sneak attack,” the 56-year-old Canton resident explains, smiling. “When you mail someone some literature about what we’re up to, they like to just put it aside and forget about it. This way, we can look into their eyes. So far, it’s been working out pretty good for us.”

It turns out that this particular funeral home has about 40 sets of unclaimed cremains, an indeterminate number of whom once served in the U.S. armed forces. O’Donnell and Price are given the funeral director’s phone number and encouraged to talk to him directly. “We’ll be back,” O’Donnell promises.

Sons of anarchy? Hardly. O’Donnell and Price are part of the Missing in America Project (MIAP), a national volunteer effort to locate, identify, and respectfully put to rest an unknown number of American military veterans whose cremains lay forgotten inside funeral homes, mortuaries, hospitals, prisons, and medical schools around the country.

The nonprofit project was launched in January 2007, with Fred Salanti, a retired Army major living in California, serving as executive director. It came on the heels of a startling discovery inside the Oregon State Hospital (the setting for the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), where roughly 5,000 rusting tin cans holding human cremains were found languishing in the basement. Some dated to the 1890s. Salanti figures as many as 1,000 of them are veterans. But hospital officials have so far refused to fully cooperate in identifying them, saying they can’t release confidential patient records to MIAP and that they lack the staff to sort through the cremains themselves.

Such neglect rankles Larry Root, the MIAP coordinator for Michigan. He mentions a master sergeant who was killed in Iraq in 2006. Two years later, his cremains remain uncollected at a funeral home in Rockford. Root is fond of a quote from an unknown author. A veteran, he says, “is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to the United States of America, for an amount of ‘up to and including my life.’ That is honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.”

“I suppose in a way this project is my way of serving,” says Root, a 52-year retired railroad worker who lives on a 50-acre farm in Concord. “It’s very satisfying when we can get these veterans out of closets and basements and give them the kind of proper send-off they deserve. It means that from now on, each Veterans Day and each Memorial Day they’re going to have a wreath or a flag placed on their grave. They’ll be remembered and honored for their service.”

As funeral directors everywhere have learned to their chagrin, the growing popularity of cremation has given new meaning to the term “shelf life.” (For more information on this topic, see the March 2008 issue of Hour Detroit). Through the immediate post-World War II era, cremation was a relatively rare practice. However, social and religious objections, particularly among Roman Catholics, began to wane in the 1960s.

Today, about one-third of all deceased Americans are cremated, the Cremation Association of North America reports. But a vexing problem accompanied this surge: What to do with all those boxes of cremains that family members either forget or refuse to pick up? In most cases, the next of kin has either died or moved or otherwise vanished, and after several decades the oldest of the abandoned cremains are unlikely ever to be retrieved.

There are no laws governing the disposal of cremains in Michigan. Any policy “depends on the individual funeral home,” says a funeral director in Mount Clemens. “The problem is that there’s no law that says you either have to hold on to them for so long or that you’re free to get rid of them.”

According to Jim Vermeulen, Jr., the owner and president of funeral homes in Westland, Plymouth, and Detroit, roughly 35 percent of the three homes’ collective 500 funerals each year are cremations. “The problem [of abandoned cremains] is only as bad as you let it become,” he says. Over the last 10 to 15 years, the firm has become more savvy about collecting information from next of kin and vigorously follows up when nobody collects the cremains. Families also sign a release that allows the funeral home to inter the cremains as they see fit after a specified period of time.

All this has substantially reduced the problem of unclaimed cremains over the past decade or so. However, it’s done nothing for the backlog of older cremains.

There wouldn’t be any criminal repercussions if an undertaker were to simply treat cremains as so many overfilled ashtrays. But civil liability remains a possibility — and that’s the rub. Most have already been consigned by their caretakers to that better-safe-than-sorry category of possessions that includes old tax returns and yellowing ledgers. Just hold onto them — and remember to take them when you move.

The fear of a lawsuit is what keeps funeral homes from being more helpful than they currently are. A MIAP volunteer will visit a funeral home to first determine if there are any unclaimed cremains and, if so, how many there are. The next step is to ask the home to provide private information from its files on each so that MIAP can check it against a database at the St. Louis Office of Veterans Affairs to determine if a particular decedent was a veteran. But MIAP volunteers rarely get that far. Few directors will release such information without a law to protect them. In fact, only a couple have even allowed the volunteers to view the cremains.

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