Where Do They Go?

 15 thousand folks are dead in New York within a few weeks. Where do they go especially if they died alone and no one comes looking for them? They take them by ferry to a speck of land in the Long Island Sound called of all thing Heart Island; a place  where there are no beating hearts. It is the one way trip where the city buries the unknown, the unclaimed or the  too poor to have a proper burial. It is on100 acres of buried souls in mass graves.

There aren't any cell phones or cameras allowed there.  Until recently no one ever heard of Heart Island but a pandemic of outrageous death  and destruction can bring out the crudest things humanity provided like mass graves. Yet Heart Island  has been a part of New York since 1868 when officials paid $75 thousand dollars to make it a city cemetery. It would have cost more than a million dollars in todays money.

We have drones  footage of mass graves now because of the Corona Virus. In the past month we went from burying 25 bodies a week to 125 bodies per week about 5 times as many. For much of the histories in time it has been run by the Department of Corrections meaning prison inmates dug the graves. Inmates from one island, Rikers Island were shipped to another island, Heart Island off to work.  They burried victims from other deadly diseases like tuberculosis, the Spanish Flu and Aids.
There is an online memorial called The Heart Island Project where victims  information is listed.

 Everyone deserves the dignity of life. We all had someone at one time to take care of us. Recently control of the island was sent to the Parks Department where now landscapers take care of the grounds. We might all not have money but we all deserve dignity.