A metaphor for something
Call me obsessed, but I can't get enough of the story, now two years-old, of how a man's body was accidentally picked up by a trash hauler at a funeral home in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, and then dumped in the nearby Auburn Hills landfill owned by Waste Management. Where amazingly, he remains (can you think of a better word?) to this day.
The latest, as reported by the Holland Sentinel, is that officials from the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth have reopened their file in the case after meeting with lawyers for Notier-VerLee-Langeland Funeral Home, Priority Arrowaste, and the family of the man in the landfill, Erwin Jordan. Funeral homes are among the businesses regulated by the department.
Now I'm a newspaper reporter, and as a group, we have a pretty dark sense of humor. It's sort of a technique for mentally coping with the murder, mayhem and other tragedies we write about on a regular basis. We'll yuck it up over weird suicides, odd accidents, and (most recently) the local woman who tried to strangle her boyfriend with her bra (underwire? Victoria's Secret?). Which segued into a discussion among the photographers over whether, if you were going to kill someone, would you want them naked or clothed?
But I struggle to find even the blackest of humor in the Erwin Jordan case, although I'll forgive you if you do. What sort of society leaves a human being's body in a landfill rather than inconvenience either the landfill owner or the taxpayers with the effort of finding it? Especially when the costs can logically be charged back to the idiots who put our Mr. Jordan there to begin with.
Hairsplitting legalities aside, find the body. If the FBI can find crime victims in Pennsylvania landfills, there is no reason what is left of Erwin Jordan can't be found and given a proper burial.