Sunday, April 5, 2020

Island of the Dead

“The Priests used the blood money returned by Judas to buy a Potter’s Field." ~ Matthew 27:5-8
As the ferry chugs across the water, the island’s withered brick of abandoned 20th century buildings came into view.  Its destination - a 120-acre site with stunning views of Long Island’s "Gold Coast."  Flocks of Canada geese patrol the island’s rich marsh grass and wild flowers.  In its prime, Hart Island had been home to a reform school, a TB hospital and an insane asylum.
Today, Hart is the final resting place for the unknowns, the discarded, and the forgotten.  Though its dead number more than the living in all but 10 U.S. cities, the graveyard remains unseen by all but the handful of convicts and guards who dig and tend its graves.
Potter's fields like Hart aren't just cemeteries for paupers and winos.  Roughly half of the Island’s dead are infants and stillborns; buried in a field reserved for babies, in shoebox-size coffins stacked five high and twenty across.
Michael is one of 28 inmates working on the island, short-timers who volunteer to ride a Rikers Prison bus to the ferry providing the only access to Hart Island each day.
The “Death Crew” is considered a plum gig, so far as Rikers options go; for 50 cents an hour they handle wooden coffins that often smell and occasionally leak.  Most welcome the change of routine and a chance to be outside.
But for Michael, the job is a blessing; an opportunity to make sure these lost souls get buried with respect.  He won’t tolerate fellow prisoners who joke or clown around.
The prisoners often know little about those they’re burying beyond their demographic data and the place where their bodies were found, scrawled on the sides of coffins (i.e. Hispanic Male, (42): found 241st Street, Inwood), and numbered to make it easier to locate and exhume them if a family comes calling (which rarely happens).
Before the coffins are lowered, one by one, from the back of a morgue truck into the hands of waiting inmates, Michael offers a brief prayer for each lost soul – always stating with the deceased’s first name.
He’d always been agnostic, but now he put all his faith in God to care for them and forgive them of any sins.  “Just because they’re poor, homeless or stillborn, doesn’t mean that we should forget them,” he promises.  “Strangers are our brothers and sisters too.”
After a final blessing, he resumes his sacred duties.
Many achieve great feats and never ask the world to see or admire them, yet instead toil day after day for others.  Instead of dining with kings, they blissfully sit with the broken, to pour love into places the privileged never witness.  It’s a pure humility to which we should all aspire.
Creator God, we ask Your presence as we honor our sisters, brothers and children.  Look over all those buried in a potter’s field, their families and friends, and those at risk of joining them.  May we acknowledge their lives and honor them.  Amen