Bodies of the Poor Piling Up at Chicago Morgue

[The Straight Story]

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 can’t keep it cool enough. The stench is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” a source told the Chicago Sun-Times. "I think it’s sacrilegious."

http://www.allgov.com/Where_is_the_Money_Going/ViewNews/Bodies_of_the_Poor_Piling_Up_at_Chicago_Morgue_120118

[Mira]

1. Horrible. I mean that very sincerely, though I must add

it sounds like what I envisioned Baghdad morgues to be like for many many years.

[mucifer]

2. This is a big issue at the hospice I work at in Chicago

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]

9. Funeral Costs Have Skyrocketed...

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]

22. really sad.

[xchrom]

3. More tax cuts, more cuts to social services,

More spending on the DOD & the MIC will solve that problem.

[Cal33]

34. This is what the Capitalists, Neocons, Libertarians, Teabaggers...want. This

is what they (and all of us) are having.

[Zalatix]

4. Don't worry, the poor aren't getting singled out

they even throw our dead soldiers in landfills.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

5. Then they can stand in line and vote every two years!!

They're in Chicago, the home of dirty politics.

[Capitalocracy]

6. The machine is being managed very poorly...

"We're human beings!...There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that 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]

7. Damn

K&R

[Laelth]

8. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[justiceischeap]

10. Is cremation any cheaper?

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]

11. It's a lot cheaper. But, many people don't want it.

[justiceischeap]

16. I'd think if you are in a situation where you're asking for aid

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]

12. Yep, it's cheaper. I'm all for it -- my ashes are gonna fly around the Flint Hills.

[MuseRider]

29. That is where mine are going too.

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]

13. Drown that baby in the bath tub, YEAH!!!!!

I say Chaps, can't we just feed them to the living poor?

[MinervaX]

18. Capital idea, my good sir, just capital

We need to get laws on the books that make it illegal to be poor. I say, sport, we already got them!

[lapislzi]

14. Tip: for those who can afford it

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]

17. my mother insisted on cremation and prepaid for one.

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]

21. I used to think I wanted cremation. Lately I'm back to burial.

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]

23. There are "green" cemeteries in several states

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]

24. That is interesting, thanks.

[CTyankee]

35. Really? I think of somebody hauling my body away to put in the ground when I could be reduced to ash

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]

36. Unless something has changed, it is illegal to scatter ashes in Missouri

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]

15. error- this is not the chicago morgue. it is the cook county morgue.

NNOOTTT the same thing. at all.

[former9thward]

26. The Cook County Morgue is in Chicago.

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]

30. nonetheless this is the responsibility of cook county government.

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]

31. I agree with you there.

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]

19. I know this is macbre

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]

33. Donation to a university cadaver program is free I believe

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]

20. Cremation: It's not heartless, it's a solution, and it's cheap. For anyone who hasn't

specified how they want their bodies to be disposed, the decision should be made for them -on behalf of everyone else.

[L0oniX]

25. "Pile Up" ...a new B horror movie.

[goforit]

28. unfortunately, this movie won't be fictional.

[former9thward]

27. This is not a new problem.

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]

32. the truck were for the big killed heat wave that we had.

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.