Death is supposed to be a final moment of closure. But for more than 3 000 South Africans lying unclaimed in mortuaries across the country, death has become a cruel waiting game. Piled into cold storage, their stories are left unfinished and their bodies remain untouched by the hands of loved ones. In life, they were perhaps forgotten by the system but in death, they are forgotten by their own families – a quiet tragedy of abandonment.
In KwaZulu-Natal alone, 1 527 unclaimed bodies remain in forensic mortuaries. The Eastern Cape, Western Cape and other provinces tell a similarly haunting tale of numbers climbing, bodies waiting – some for months – others for years. The Department of Health lists reasons as simple as misidentification or the failure of families to come forward. In reality, this paints a far more complex picture of social breakdown: families torn apart by poverty, migration or trauma, unable to assemble the resources or the emotional capacity to claim their dead.
In life, many of the people might have been invisible, slipping through the cracks of a society that could not or would not see them. But to die and remain unclaimed, unknown, speaks to something deeper. It speaks to a failure to preserve the most basic human connection – family, remembrance and dignity. The unclaimed dead are not merely statistics. They are not just 3 000 nameless faces catalogued by mortuary staff and logged into cold databases. They are forgotten people, lost first to a system and now, in death, to their own kin.
I understand this kind of loss. It sits closer to home than I care to admit.
My brother passed away years ago, but the memory of when – the year, month and day – has slipped away. I can’t remember where he was laid to rest. His grave has become a place I cannot visit because the cemetery records have been burnt to ashes. This is not a story of neglect, but of time erasing what should be unforgettable.
I’ve thought about this often. How does someone fade into a distant echo? How does a death go from being the worst day of your life to something you can barely recall? My brother is part of the forgotten dead – not lying in a mortuary, but lost in a different way. Time, the silent thief, has taken him from us again. Not in body, but in memory. A double death, if you will.
This, I fear, is the fate of the 3 000 unclaimed bodies. They are not just lost to a bureaucratic system of freezing and documenting; they are lost to us all. Somewhere, there are families who have forgotten or who cannot remember. Somewhere, there are people too poor, too disconnected or too overwhelmed to claim their dead. And in those moments of forgetting, lingers the fate of the unclaimed dead: they are lost not once, but twice – first in life, and again in memory.
And so, they wait, as if waiting for someone to remember.
Saturday Star