Sierra Hubbard didn’t know what to do when Christina Laroe died.

Laroe — with her bright and funny personality, decorated and embellished walker, and pretty singing voice — had been unhoused for six years, since the age of 32.

Hubbard, the supportive housing program manager at the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness, knew her remains and her memory deserved more than to be forgotten.

“There was a discussion among staff — there was a day where we were just like, what happens to her?” Hubbard said. “I don’t know that it had occurred to us that maybe nothing happens or we don’t know what happens.”

Laroe had never mentioned any family who could work with a funeral home, get an obituary put together and schedule a service. Hubbard stepped up.

Before Laroe could be cremated, an application to the city for help with funeral costs needed to be filled out, death certificates had to completed with things like dates and places of birth, family information and financial information. Someone had to choose a location for the plot at the cemetery, and a headstone of some kind had to be designed. Donations could help pay for them.

So that’s what she did.

“I don’t know what happens if no one’s involved in that,” Hubbard said. “I don’t want to know.”

Laroe had been found on a bench in the coalition parking lot, remembered Angela Spinney, the programs director. Friends honored her in that same parking lot, in chairs arranged in a circle and a table with flowers and photos. Pastor Jon Hopkins from Concordia Lutheran Church led the service.

Laroe died in the summer of 2023. By the time an interment could be scheduled, the ground was frozen. Laroe’s ashes remained at the coalition. When spring returned, a date was set at Blossom Hill Cemetery.

Just a few weeks before the burial, Hubbard got a call she never thought she’d get.

It was Christina’s sister.

Attempts to locate family –  by the coalition, by Concord Police, by other agencies – had been fruitless. But Laroe’s sister had Googled her one day and seen her name in the newspaper, part of a story about the annual vigil held in Concord, Hubbard recalled. She lived in Manchester, and she wanted to come to the burial.

When their phone call ended, Hubbard burst into tears, bewildered.

“Because that was the whole point, right?” she said. “It felt so far-fetched when we first talked about it, the idea that we would just have some family out there looking for this person. But it’s not.”

When people experiencing homelessness die, as just under ten of them did in Concord last year, the news rarely reaches the broader community. A vigil is held annually on the shortest night of the year in December, where the weight of all those lost bears down at once. Few of them have an obituary in the paper. Their friends and acquaintances will share a memory over breakfast at the Friendly Kitchen or at the coalition’s resource center. They might tape a cardboard sign to a lamp post with their name and “R.I.P.” before the wind and rain whip it down.

“We should always, every time, be outraged when someone dies and they’re sleeping outside,” Hubbard said. “It should be an outrage every time.”

Hubbard hated the idea of an unmarked grave, of a “pauper’s drawer” in a mausoleum. That was the inevitable outcome if no one came forward. It felt so meaningless, both for the person who’d been lost and for the hope of family who may come looking.

“It seems like it’s so easy to forget those people,” she said. “It was so important to all of us that they have somewhere private, an individual space where they can be mourned and remembered.”

‘Every effort’

If someone is living at a campsite when they pass, it is most often someone sleeping nearby who finds them and calls police, said Barrett Moulton, a deputy chief at the Concord Police Department. Officers will assess what happened, notify the county attorney and the medical examiner. They’ll often perform an autopsy. Police are also the first of several people who try to locate and inform the next of kin.

“We make every effort we can to do that, and sometimes it’s successful, sometimes it’s not,” Moulton said.

When a family is involved, arrangements for a person who died while experiencing homelessness may not be much different than for anyone else. But families can’t be located for everyone, which happens about two to four times a year.

“I mean there are family,” Mouton said. “It’s just they, you know, they haven’t spoken for a while, or they’ve been distant.”

Everything, from moving remains from the hospital to a funeral home to cremation to burial, costs money. For anyone whose family isn’t looped in and who doesn’t have assets — people like Laroe — or whose family is unable to pay for arrangements, the City of Concord provides financial assistance.

Not every person or family getting this help was experiencing homelessness, noted Concord Human Services Director Karen Emis-Williams. Across all cases, the city on average paid for a dozen funerals, for a total of around $12,000, in each of the last few years.

Once an application for assistance is complete, the body can be transported to the funeral home and cremated.

Matt and Katie Roan own a funeral home in Pembroke and often work with the city and the coalition.

When neither family nor the coalition are involved, their staff will research someone to fill out their death certificate. Sometimes, a paper trail will lead them as far as California, calling one public agency after another trying to confirm someone’s date of birth. Where a paper trail is silent, they and their staff will ask around.

They’ve walked through railroad tracks and trudged through the woods, doing everything they can to not have to write “unknown” on a death certificate.

“You feel like the last line of defense,” Matt Roan said.

‘Like a bear lying in wait’

Rev. David Keller remembers the first service he ever led for someone who had lived without shelter in Concord.

John Alexa was chatty, protective and a good handyman. He had been renting an apartment for several months when he died, but he had spent months the previous winter in the emergency shelter at First Congregational Church, helping out at the food pantry in the daytime as well.

Alexa’s family attended the service, but it was Keller who identified him at the morgue — something he never wants to do again. Alexa’s ashes were stored on Keller’s bookshelf at the church for six years after the service, until he moved out of it in 2011. He passed them onto a friend of John’s, another Concord resident who lived unhoused for a time.

Keller routinely led services for people he’d known through the shelter or the coalition over the years. One was for Richard Spellman, who used a pre-paid card to make payphone calls to his two daughters as much as he could. Another was for Milton Simonds, who was one of the lucky few who found housing before he died. Keller went to visit Simonds at Concord Hospital and found his stepdaughter, who had been wandering the halls looking for him.

Though he retired in 2021, Keller is sometimes still asked to do services, maybe at a local church, maybe at the resource center or the Friendly Kitchen.

Keller makes a point to quote passages from the Book of Lamentations. In it, a man living in homelessness after a war is bitter with God. Amid his pain, he says the Lord is “like a bear lying in wait” who has “dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help.”

“It’s some of the strongest language in the Bible,” Keller said. That’s why he likes it. “I mean, this guy really pulls no punches.”

As a preacher, Keller said he aims to provide mourners permission — to be vulnerable, yes, but also to be angry. He feels it, too.

Just over a week before he died, Spellman ran the sound system at the annual vigil remembering people who died while experiencing homelessness.

“Next year, his name will be added to that list,” Keller said in his sermon. “The thought makes my guts turn sour.”

Spellman had wanted to return to the carpentry trade he’d been in for many years, but never could.

There is personal loss — of a friend, a brother, a daughter, maybe — but there is also outrage. In Keller’s grief, the two are woven together, “a seamless garment,” as he put it.

“I don’t want anyone’s death to just be a one-off, an ‘Oh well, too bad,’” Keller said. “No, no, no — There’s a system that is functioning in such a way that allowed that to happen, and that needs to be said.”

‘Service of Farewell’

Cemetery Administrator Jill Huckins refuses to let anyone be buried in a Concord cemetery without someone there to say goodbye.

Plenty of people die in the city without family around to attend a burial: seniors whose family predeceased them, inmates at the state prison, snowbirds who died down South but asked to rest in Concord and, sometimes, people who were experiencing homelessness.

In those situations, Huckins performs a “Service of Farewell.”

Inside the grave, with walls as smoothly dug as any other, she places a rose atop each black box of ashes and freckles the dirt with cutout stars, meant to “bless and light their journey.”

“We are grateful for your life and we honor your death,” she says. She stands by until the ground is fully smoothed. “I stay right, right to the end.”

When Huckins took the top cemetery job in Concord in 2006, these services didn’t exist. Those without arrangements or family were matter-of-factly placed in Blossom Hill’s “Common Ground” section. She saw no dignity in that.

Huckins worked with interfaith minister Terry Odell in Penacook to build the Service of Farewell, and she’s done it 218 times since. She keeps a file with the reading from each one, with receipts for the roses stapled to them. If family comes along looking for someone — which has happened — she can pull out the printed readings from their service.

“We’re never alone when we’re born,” she said. “I don’t want anyone’s last point of being on this earth to be alone.”

Huckins never dreamed of working in a cemetery, but she now considers the job her calling.

“I decided that this, this was my mission in life,” she said. “I think everyone should have that opportunity to feel included, loved, honored — because not everybody is. If I can do one little piece with someone that’s already passed, I wanted to do that.”

A few of these services a year are for people who died while experiencing homelessness and whose families aren’t around or didn’t make other plans. She really takes her time with them.

“Everyone deserves it, but they really deserve it,” she said. “I can’t begin to understand what their life, what happened in their life to make them where they were that day. I wish there was more that I could do. I’m sure that there is.”

‘Every time’

Hubbard left the coalition at the end of last year, but Spinney, the programs director, said they still follow the process she organized.

“It’s a really nice way to get closure,” Spinney said. “Sometimes we can work with a client for two years, five years, 10 years, and they might disappear, and we will never know what happened to them… It’s helpful for me to know that there’s an end, a period at the end of the sentence.”

For each of the people who play a role in this process, death is part of the job. Hubbard wishes it hadn’t been part of hers.

“You’re coming from a place where you may have seen it coming down the road. That’s really hard to sit with, but you have to learn to sit with that,” Hubbard said. “You can’t own things that are not yours to own.”

Making these arrangements helped Hubbard let go.

“You just do right by them in every way that you can. So being able to do that for people — to make sure that anyone who dies is treated with dignity and respect, regardless of their housing status — I think is a really small, but really powerful thing.”

 

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cm claughlin@cmonitor.com. You can subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.