USPS Is Holding On To 452 Cremated Human Remains

USPS delivery van is seen in Chicago, United States, on October 14, 2022.
Image: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto (Getty Images)

You don’t want your final resting place to be a dead letter office, but unfortunately that’s where 452 people have found themselves, spending eternity as undeliverable mail with the U.S. Postal Service.

USPS Office of Inspector General released a Cremated Remains report this week detailing failures within the post office to deliver these former humans to their intended final destinations. According to Vice:

The USPS is the only legal way to ship cremated remains. At least in theory, the USPS has strict procedures for handling such sensitive and irreplaceable packages. Remains must be shipped via Priority Mail Express and have a giant orange sticker attached to the side of the box (the sticker used to be teal). They are also supposed to be handled differently than other Priority Mail Express packages.

However, the OIG report found some or all of these procedures are not done between 28 and 50 percent of the time, which could go some way towards explaining how 452 cremated remains boxes ended up in the USPS’s warehouse for lost packages. According to the report, “as of February 27, 2023, the MRC [Mail Recovery Center] had 452 undeliverable and/or unidentifiable Cremated Remains packages,” the oldest being there since February 24, 2015.

While there is nothing to fear from human remains, it is a sorry fate to spend your final resting place bouncing around the federal system. Such packages are supposed to be clearly marked as needing extra care while handling, but the USPS study found this wasn’t always the case. Even when packages were clearly marked, they were not always handled appropriately by workers in postal facilities. Lost packages end up at the Mail Recovery Center, a sort of Lost and Found for undeliverable packages. Usually packages that linger in the MRC for over 60 days are then either thrown away or auctioned off on the GovDeals website if they are worth over $25.

This is luckily not the case with human remains. But since no one quite knows what to do with the undeliverable remains, they just stack up.

The report makes recommendations and points out good practices from some of the post offices, but there seems to be no immediate solution or resolution for the 452 human remains lost in the machines of government.