Buried Secrets

John Horan has handled a thousand bodies, but even now, after 25 years, the forgotten ones still get to him."This was an eleven-year-old child," he says, examining a green cardboard package no larger than a deck of cards. "I can't imagine how anyone could abandon the remains of an eleven-year-old child. But here it is. Abandoned."

Horan is standing before a large file cabinet in the basement crematorium of his mortuary on South Parker Road. A huge crematory furnace fired up to 1,800 degrees roars in the corner, fluorescent lights hum overhead, a polished steel box filled with cooling ashes sits on the floor. Inside the cabinet, stacked on a closet shelf, are the remains of sixty men, women and children. They've languished here for decades, waiting for someone to claim them.

"Here's one from 1979," Horan says, running a finger down a handwritten label in faded red ink. "And here's one from 1939." The packages are in this cabinet because Horan doesn't know what else to do with them. In most cases, he only knows the name and cremation date on the box, and that inside that box lies a mystery.

The mortician selects a small porcelain urn resembling a sugar bowl.

"Here's a baby," he says, turning the bowl slowly in his hands. "When you think about the remains of people who have been sitting here for sixty years, you just shake your head. I know there is someone out there who cared about this child."

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Each year, about 12,000 people die in metro Denver. Of those, half are cremated. That's twice the national average, which hovers around 25 percent, up from only 10 percent in 1985. Morticians speculate about the reasons for Colorado's high cremation rate: People here are not as invested in traditional ceremonies as were past generations; they are less rooted in the area and more likely to move on; they are more open to alternative ways of memorializing the dead; they are reluctant to spend the $10,000 it often costs for a standard burial. If the trend continues, they predict that 75 percent of all of the people who die in Denver in 2020 could be cremated.

As the percentage of cremations rises, so does the number of abandoned urns. Nationwide, more than 30,000 unclaimed packages sit on mortuary shelves; in Denver, the total easily tops several hundred. Some mortuaries have more than others, but everyone has them. And as Memorial Day approaches, those unclaimed packages make Horan stop and think.

"These are the remains of people who once lived," he says. "And when I look in this cabinet, I wonder who they were and how it's possible their lives mattered so little that their families abandoned them. To me, every life deserves to be remembered in some dignified way. And when they aren't, it's sad."

Horan owns and operates one of Denver's oldest mortuaries, Horan & McConaty, which was established in 1890. His great-grandfather was a mortician, his grandfather was a mortician, his mother was a mortician. And everything about the 43-year-old heir reflects the family profession: his firm handshake, his empathetic smile, his attentive ear, his gift of gab, his crisp white shirt.

The abandoned urns pose not just moral, ethical and spiritual problems, Horan says, but also a legal one. Until the remains are claimed, morticians are responsible for them. If the ashes are lost, stolen, damaged, destroyed or somehow mixed with other remains, mortuaries could face million-dollar lawsuits. And so, following the lead of other states, next year Colorado morticians will ask lawmakers to grant them authority to scatter or bury unclaimed remains after a certain time period. Many morticians, including Horan, already have such deadlines written into customer contracts, but they've been reluctant to take that final step.

"I just find it very hard to do," Horan says. "I just keep thinking that sometime, somewhere, someone is going to regret abandoning the remains and come back and get them."

But even when survivors do come forward to claim remains -- and they occasionally have -- they don't always handle them properly. A while back, one family claimed an urn that had languished in Horan's file cabinet for years. The next day, the mortuary got a call from a security guard at the old Stapleton airport, who'd fished the ashes from a trash can. "When I look at these remains, I see a life," Horan says. "But I've grown to understand that not everyone sees it that way."

One elderly woman calls Horan's mortuary practically every year to check on some ashes that have sat in an urn in the basement for fifty years. When Horan asks if she would like to claim them, she always replies, "No, I'm not interested in that. I just want to know if you have them.'"

Few survivors are so blunt regarding their failure to pick up a relative's remains. Some families don't have time to select a place to scatter or bury the ashes and so ask the mortuary to keep them temporarily; then one thing leads to another, deadlines are extended, and the morticians get stuck holding the bag. Other times, families can't agree on what should be done with the urns, so the remains stay in limbo. Occasionally, a survivor couldn't stand the person in life and wants nothing to do with him in death. And sometimes, the dead person simply doesn't have relatives to claim him -- not in Denver, anyway.