With the country gripped by a homelessness epidemic, community-minded students at one high school in Detroit are volunteering their time to ensure dignified burials for homeless and unclaimed veterans in their city.
“It’s a reminder that every person, especially in the Christian religious tradition, is made in the image of God and is deserving of a particular regard and respect,” Richard Mazyck, campus ministry and service coordinator for University of Detroit Jesuit School, told Today.com.
Mazyck heads up the school’s Pallbearer Ministry, founded back in 2015. He coordinates student volunteers who are willing to take time out of their day to help bury forgotten veterans, as well as other unclaimed individuals who would otherwise have nobody.
“Everybody has worth and value,” he told the outlet. “Assisting at their funeral, or at their committal and burial, is a way of honoring their lives, even though we may have never met them.”
The ministry was created in 2015, after six seniors stepped forward with a desire to help.
“This was an opportunity to give something to somebody who finished their life on the fringe of society,” former student Tom Lennon told Today.com at the time. “These veterans were men I had never met, but they helped make the country I live in safer and stronger. No matter who they were or what they did on earth, every person deserves a proper burial.”
The school works together with a local funeral home, which holds unclaimed bodies while the county attempts to locate relatives. If 90 days pass with no response, the funeral home then begins to make burial arrangements.
Caskets are provided by Dignity Memorial Network’s Homeless Veterans Program, which works nationwide to offer burials to homeless and unclaimed veterans.
Before each service, volunteers research the deceased, finding out as much as they can. Sometimes they find only a name, other times an entire history.
The students will sometimes act as pallbearers, at other times as a team of “honor guards,” even just showing up to offer a prayer for the dead.
After a pandemic-induced pause from 2019-2021, the school’s ministry has come back, reportedly even more active than previously.
Mazyck told the outlet the experience offers participants a way to grow — both as students and as human beings.
“It’s great to be with other people and pray with them, encourage them or just be present with them when they’re in their sorrow. We all have times and moments of sorrow in our lives, including the passing of loved ones and friends and colleagues,” he said.
“So it’s really an honor and, in itself, it’s own consolation to be able to offer some support.”