http://www.facebook.com/notes/ap/findin ... 0515895651Finding the story among Hart Island's 800,000 dead
by AP on Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 7:02pm
On Aug. 25, 2010, Michael Jones holds a frame with pictures of his older brother, who vanished in 1993. Jones has been searching for his brother's body among the unidentified buried in Hart Island.
In a media hotbed like New York, it would be easy to assume that few stories go overlooked. But the city's Hart Island is a repository for more than 800,000 such stories — the tales of lives that ended in anonymity.
New York has been ferrying its unclaimed dead to Hart Island since 1869. When I began talking with people who have relatives and friends buried there, it quickly became clear just how much of New York's everyday existence remains hidden. The challenge as a reporter was figuring out which of those stories to tell.
I decided it was best to focus on just a few people who, through searches for the missing, have developed relationships with the island over time. That left many stories in my notebook untold, but certainly no less worthy of being heard.
They belong to people like Marina De La Luz, who recounted how she was raised by the daughter of a high school teacher and learned she was adopted only when she began to question why she looked so different from everyone else in her family. As an adult, she went searching for her birth family and found a brother — whose nose looked just like hers — on Facebook. He told her their birth mother had dreamed of becoming a marine biologist. But that was before she discovered crack cocaine. In 2006, she was claimed by AIDS and was buried on Hart Island.
"I never knew her laugh or the way she smiled or what was her favorite meal," said De La Luz, who now lives in Virginia Beach, Va.
Arnie Charnick, though, finds peace knowing that his brother, Ray, is buried on Hart Island.
Charnick recalled boyhood summers in the Bronx when he and his brother occasionally stole row boats for trips out to a mysterious island offshore. Arnie grew up to become a painter. But Ray "was a junkie and a thief for 30 years," his brother said. He spent 20 of those in prison and contracted AIDS, probably from a shared needle.
Geller
When Ray died in 1998, Arnie got a call from the medical examiner's office — if he did not claim the body, the city would bury Ray. When Arnie heard that the city's potters field was on the island the brothers had rowed out to as boys, he was stunned. Then he learned that all burials on the island are done by city jail inmates and realized it was the perfect place to bury his brother. In 2005, he kept a promise to his parents to scatter their ashes over Ray's grave.
"It was an unbelievably beautiful morning, salmon skies, and there I am, me alone," he says. "The island was gorgeous and...the gods were saying to me, you made the right decision."?
AP National Writer Adam Geller is based in New York.
