The customary rituals that follow a person’s death — cremation, burial, memorials — are familiar to us all in one way or another. But what happens with these rituals when the deceased has no one to see to them? And, what if, on top of that, they’re only infants?
As macabre as it sounds, these tragic situations find a degree of resolution with Garden of Innocence, a nonprofit that provides burial services for unidentified and abandoned babies.
“We take the babies that are 20 weeks past gestation — and that’s usually six months — and the mom has either miscarried them in the hospital or walked away,” said Lori Sanchez, the director of Garden of Innocence By the Sea, which serves Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. “The hospital then has 60 days to contact them, or they send a letter to them, and they have 60 days in order to call the hospital back and go and get their remains. But with our babies, nobody did.”