An unclaimed body, a solitary burial and a last goodbye

At fifteen minutes before 10 a.m. on a blue-sky June morning, a glossy black hearse pulled up to an expanse of fresh-cut grass at the Anchorage city cemetery.

A funeral director in a suit and sunglasses stepped out and a pearlescent gray casket was loaded onto a cart and pushed to a plot against the Fairbanks Street fence, in a spot fragrant with blooming lilacs.

So began the lonely burial on Wednesday of Theodore Martin Williams, better known as Teddy.

There was no ceremony and no mourners, just the funeral director and a cemetery worker in a fluorescent vest. Together they placed the casket in a black plastic burial vault and eased it into an open grave, dug the night before. A magpie screeched across the street, a lawn mower in another part of the cemetery hummed and a plane flew low overhead. No one spoke.

When they were finished, they covered the grave with plywood and placed orange traffic cones around it. 

Then they walked away and left the man known as Teddy Williams to his peace.

Williams died on Jan. 16, nearly five months earlier. He was 55, and his last known address was Karluk Manor, a housing facility built to get the city's most severe homeless alcoholics off the streets.

But after he died, no one stepped forward to take possession of his body or arrange for burial. After a week or so of uncertainty, his body was sent to a funeral home to be preserved and stored until next-of-kin could be found.

Failing to find family or friends, the state coroner eventually filed a "Petition for Unclaimed Body" with the court.

With no leads, a judge on May 26 ordered Williams buried.

Richard Lose stood over the grave, which was a little less than 6 feet deep. In a few hours he'd return to fill in the dirt and replace clods of topsoil and grass. His crew of workers had dug the graves for more than a few of these solitary burials, called "direct interments" in the parlance of mortuary ritual. 

"Why do some people have 150 people at the service and others have no one?" he said. "Yeah. I wonder sometimes."

Burial with dignity

The state of Alaska is generous to its people in death.

Williams' embalming, casket, burial vault, transportation by hearse and burial fees — in the neighborhood of several thousand dollars — had been paid for by an obscure fund nestled deep within the bureaucracy of the Division of Public Assistance. The "general assistance fund" exists to ensure that Alaskans who are alone or indigent when they die can be buried with dignity.

Partly, this is practical: The state must dispose of bodies. The medical examiner can hold on to them for five days or so, but then they are sent to a local funeral home on a rotating basis. If no one claims them, they can be there for months — at the funeral home's own storage expense. 

Partly, it is compassionate: In some other states, a public-paid burial can mean a plastic-lined cardboard box, an open pit, a team of prisoners doing the burying or cremation with no option of burial. In New York City, the "Potter's Field" on Hart Island contains the corpses of more than 1 million people, essentially buried in mass graves.

In Alaska, burials of unclaimed or unidentified bodies are relatively rare. So far this year the coroner has asked for court orders to bury five people. But unclaimed bodies represent only a tiny fraction of the burials the general assistance fund pays for.

Much more frequently, Alaska pays to bury its poor. Last year, the fund covered basic burial expenses for 996 people, or about a quarter of the roughly 4,000 deaths in the state. The total cost: Close to $3 million. The money can only be used for costs like embalming, a casket and burial, not for extras like flowers.

That $3 million is a drop in ocean of the state budget, but as an unprecedented fiscal crisis carves away at public services, the future of  state-paid burial assistance is in question. As it stands now, the proposed budget cuts for next year slash $1.7 million, or about two-thirds, from the fund, according to the Division of Public Assistance.

People in the funeral and cemetery business agree Alaska does much more for those who die poor or alone than most states.

Except for the lack of mourners, Williams' burial was indistinguishable from one of a wealthier person. The casket was a basic model, but it was more than a pine box. The hearse was the same as any other. Decades ago, the cemetery had a "poor" section where the indigent were buried. Cemetery director Rob Jones doesn't believe in that. Theodore Martin Williams was laid to rest just down the path from the burial plots of some of Anchorage's most prominent families.

'This is our dad'

But Teddy Williams was not nearly as alone as he seemed.

About 10 minutes after the burial was scheduled to begin, two women walked up. One was clutching a plastic-wrapped bunch of deep red carnations.

"Is this where Teddy Williams is being buried?" asked Michelle Hedden, 25. 

"Did we miss it?" asked Sasha Williams, 28. "This is our dad."

Williams had taken the day off work as a hostess at a restaurant in the airport to come. Her sister Michelle Hedden, 25, had flown up from Mesa, Arizona, where she lives and works providing child care at a church.

They had wanted to see the casket and be present for the burial. And they had just missed it.

Hedden knelt down by the edge of the grave and began to cry.

The man everyone called Teddy Williams was born in Sitka but had lived in Anchorage for as long as his daughters could remember. Sasha Williams said she believed her father had five children, including her and her sister. He had been one of the first residents of Karluk Manor when it opened in late 2011. They didn't know much about the details of his life before then.

The sisters' own early lives had been chaotic. Their mother had died, Williams said. They had separately spent time in several foster care placements before each was adopted.

They saw their father sporadically. There was some question of whether he was their biological father. But they always thought of him as their dad. In a life where family had been fragmented, that was something.

They had some happy memories of him: Williams remembered Christmas stockings he filled with candy but failed to hide very well from eager children. Hedden remembered climbing a dresser repeatedly to snatch some Juicy Fruit gum, and her dad good-naturedly pulling her down, again and again. He gave them nicknames: "Boo" for Michelle and "Rock" for Sasha.

Hedden pulled out her phone. There was a picture of the two of them smiling together at the Golden Corral buffet restaurant in Midtown. She remembered they had eaten chicken, mashed potatoes and chocolate ice cream, which they both loved. She said she wouldn't be able to walk into Golden Corral without thinking of him.

The sisters hadn't heard about their father's death right away. There was a rumor he'd frozen in a park, but they later heard he died of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Hedden learned about her father's death when she got a condolence card from the residents of Karluk Manor in the mail more than a month later. She knew little beyond that, and certainly not that her father's body was being stored in a funeral home while the state searched for his family. She had learned only a week or two before that he would be buried.

Sasha Williams still hadn't seen any of his personal belongings, including a laptop and a charm necklace his daughters had given him. Given the difficulty of tracking those things down, she wasn't really surprised it appeared on paper that her father had no family at all.

But he did.

His daughter pointed to a well-tended grave nearby with a yellow potted rose. She wanted something like that for her father, and a nice marble headstone too. It would read: "Theodore Martin Williams. May he rest at peace."

A couple walked toward the plot.

The sisters had hoped to meet some of the people at Karluk Manor they heard had been so affected by their father's death. There had been a memorial service for him there. Were these some of them? But the couple walked to another grave site nearby.

Eventually the cemetery manager gently asked Hedden and Williams to move. Another hearse had arrived with another casket, to be buried in the plot directly next to their father.

The two stared at the plywood-covered grave, carnations heaped on the grass. 

"It's a good thing we came for him today," Williams said. "Because no one else did."

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Rob Jones' title. He is the cemetery director, not the cemetery manager.