Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about something I have read. Sometimes it is about television or food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!
On a long holiday travel day last month, I listened to all seven episodes of the Radio Diaries series “Unmarked Graveyard,” which tells the stories of people buried in America’s largest public graveyard, Hart’s Island, a strip off land off of the Bronx in New York City:
Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the Bronx, is America’s largest public cemetery, sometimes known as a “potter’s field.” Since 1869, more than a million people have been buried on Hart Island, including early AIDS patients, unidentified and unclaimed New Yorkers, immigrants, incarcerated people, artists, and about ten percent of New Yorkers who died of COVID-19.
Many people buried there are shrouded in anonymity. The island has no headstones or plaques, just numbered markers. Simple pine coffins are stacked in mass graves. In many cases, explanations for how bodies came to be buried there are hard to find.
Our series tells the stories of seven people buried on Hart Island through a range of circumstances. Some were lost in the system after their deaths, while others had been cut off from family and friends for years. One chose Hart Island as his final resting place. Each story is told by the people who knew them best, some of whom overcame tremendous obstacles to uncover what happened to their loved ones.
It’s a really beautifully done set of stories that will introduce you to, among others, a queer composer who decided he wanted to be buried there when making end-of-life plans after a bladder cancer diagnosis, a forgotten Jazz age novelist, and beloved uncles, sons, dads, and neighbors.
Hart Island is open to the public for the first time, with twice-monthly tours; the Hart Island Project also documents the island’s history and the identities of people buried there. You might have heard about it because a lot of people killed by COVID were buried there. (In 2019, 846 adults were buried there; in 2020, 2,334 were.) A lot of people who died of AIDS-related conditions were also buried there over the years, and there’s a project to identify them.
I started teaching this week and was in the throes of family childcare last week, but I’ll be back on my Monday horse on … Monday. Have a good weekend.