John Doe’s Dead
In the day since losing my wallet, I’ve made a point of carrying an old business card around with me, for some abstract ID purpose.
It’s strange to not have eight things with your name on them in your pocket at all times. I keep thinking of what would happen if I somehow died, in some disfiguring way. Would I go in an unmarked grave? Be a John Doe in some case file? Are either of those things still what happens to anonymous bodies?
Rhetorical blog questions, with the internet at one’s fingertips, are dumb. Here is what would happen:
After attempts to identify my remains, the coroner’s office would eventually classify me as a John Doe. At this point, it seems that New York state research institutions have a right to ask for my body for medical purposes. In the law outlining this process, “chiropractic colleges” are explicitly mentioned as potential cadaver recipients.
If I don’t end up being used to demonstrate proper massage technique, I’d likely be buried in the Hart Island potter’s field—the destination for most of the city’s unclaimed or indigent dead.
Hart Island is a squiggly thing in the Long Island Sound, way up east of the Bronx’s City Island. Decedents are buried in numbered pine boxes whose prices vary, depending on size, but seem to generally cost something in the $50 range. Prisoners from Riker’s Island work as gravediggers for about ¢50/hour (although this number is probably out of date), having been bused and ferried there for that job alone.
The graves are mass. Adults get laid in 2x3 stacks (3 deep), infants and children in a matrix running five down and twenty across. A lot of babies get buried there, often coming from the city’s hospitals.
The term “potter’s field” comes from the Bible. Judas is said to have taken his 30 pieces of silver (the payment rendered for snitching on/enabling the divine sacrifice of Jesus)back to the priests to establish a burial ground for any unknown, unbelieving dead. He chose the local potter’s field, likely a strip-mined and clay-rich plot unfit for agriculture. The name stuck. The resonance of the idea, of clay and form and flesh, is irresistible.
The problem with carrying an out-of-date business card in my pocket is that a dim-witted investigator might just think I had recently met a man named Sam Dean whose office phone number strangely led to someone else. The Wire has convinced me that any dumbness can persist in local bureaucracy.
It occurred to me that I could write, “This is me,” or, “In the event that you find this on a dead person’s person, N.B. that the dead person is this same Sam,” or something like that, but that’s probably a little on the nose. Wouldn’t want to give the morbid thought too much credence, anyway.
