Unremarked and Unattended Death in New York City

For years when I was a young chaplain, I brought groups of students to New York City on what we called then ‘urban plunges.” Today they would be called urban discoveries or immersions or something less active and more contemplative. “Plunging” was often a required experience for students, particularly those from rural areas. We knew what we didn’t know about cities.

We would plunge for a week. We would stay on the floors of churches, eat in soup kitchens, sometimes live in shelters. We always went to the Bowery which had a thriving ministry for homeless men at the time. We would watch them accept religious conversion in exchange for soup and a bed. We would wake up at 5 a.m. and watch them all march out of the shelter because “it was good for them to wake up early and get going.”

We would visit the city morgue at Bellevue Hospital. They could not believe how many shelves of dead bodies there were — often 100 or so stacked row by row, mostly black men. What really got to the students was the fact that there were so few names. Mostly there were numbers. Number 83. Number 100. Etc.

Today with the virus that pattern is increasing — although as most funeral directors will tell you, there is more a problem burying the many who are dead WITH names than those without. Body bags are also in short supply. The numbers shift so I won’t report them here. In fact, I could find out. But I would prefer my readers to think about the people more than the number. There is something painfully distancing about “650 died today’…