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Prickett and Timmermans’s other subjects struggled not with homelessness or addiction but with social isolation. Lena, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, spent decades on her own. She had barely entered adulthood, in the early 1930s, when a speeding car killed her father; her mother suffered a “mental breakdown” and was institutionalized. Lena married, but her husband died young in 1966, the same year that her brother, a laborer, was crushed to death by a bulldozer. By the early 2000s, she had no plumbing or heat; she passed days in the dark and slept with a hammer beside her pillow. Eventually, a nephew became her conservator (against her wishes) and moved her into a nursing facility; soon, though, family stopped visiting. Lena became, the authors write, “socially dead,” her few remaining social ties torn, her once flush bank account drained by the “cost of growing old in America.” In 2012, she died at the age of 98.

Finally, for David, isolation came with age. For years he had drifted along the countercultural currents of the late twentieth century, moving to Las Vegas in the 1960s, experimenting with drugs, joining Scientology, marrying, divorcing, leaving Scientology, finding a “run-down” apartment he liked in Los Angeles, hiking on nearby trails. By 2017, though, he was in his seventies and had few social ties—his apartment’s property manager suspected he could go days without talking to another person. “David didn’t necessarily feel lonely,” the authors write, “but his social network was small.” In this respect he was like many older people (especially men), perhaps a quarter of whom are considered “socially isolated,” putting them at greater risk of dementia, heart disease, and premature death. David’s world narrowed. “First, his number of friends dwindled, then his body shrank,” Prickett and Timmermans write. He died alone in his apartment. His body was discovered by his building’s super, days later.

Much of The Unclaimed is devoted to the heroic efforts of underfunded, overworked Los Angeles county employees to track down the relatives of the unclaimed, to notify them, transfer an estate, or ask if they would cover the cost of a burial or cremation. For many of the relatives, the expense of a private funeral or the out-of-state transport of remains is too much to bear. Bobby’s son had to take on extra shifts at work and then a loan from his mother to afford a private cremation; Midge’s niece couldn’t claim her aunt’s ashes because she was undergoing chemotherapy and the county didn’t offer shipping. Volunteer organizations have sprung up to bury unclaimed infants and unclaimed veterans with dignity.