Death, as the cliche goes, is one of life’s few certainties.  

At some point in time, all of us with loved ones will be bereaved by their passing. We will attend services, gather with family and friends, and otherwise memorialize the dead we once knew.  

And, eventually, all of us will die.  

Though death is a universal experience, the nature of death and dying in the United States continues to evolve.   

Thanks to technological advances, shifting healthcare norms, the rearrangement of families, communities and social structures, ongoing differences due to class and race, as well as alterations to America’s religious landscape, death and dying in the U.S. have changed dramatically in recent decades.  

Over the last century, life expectancy has continued (with occasional setbacks) to increase — with the current lifespans lasting an average of 77.5 years — and three-quarters (74.76%) of the nearly 3.1 million deaths in the U.S. in 2023 were to persons aged 65 and older. Death is also a progressively protracted and isolating affair. Occurring after a chronic illness, long-term discomfort, or slow-but-steady cognitive decline, many face the egress alone, as smaller families, divorce rates, and the continuing breakdown of connections among individuals’ social networks leaves many with fragile networks of community and care at the end of their lives.  

And while religion in the U.S. may not be dying, our changing relationship with faith has important implications for how individuals and communities face the end of life in 21st-century America.  

Living and dying in “haunted lands”  

Death, wrote sociologist of religion Peter Berger, is the ultimate uncertainty. “Beyond the datum of inescapable annihilation at some point in our lives,” Berger wrote in 2015, just two years before his own passing, “death remains distressingly ambiguous.”  

To counteract the seeming chaos of death and dying, religious traditions have developed a whole range of beliefs and practices to sidestep, survive, overcome, or otherwise ameliorate death’s unpredictability.  

And whether one believes in reincarnation, eternal life, or the ultimate finality of death, different rituals help people of faith, or no faith at all, mark the end of life. As Jews sit shiva, Muslims make ghusl, Sikhs place the recently deceased before the Guru Granth Sahib, Christians recite a Psalm by the graveside or Hindus purify the recently departed in fire, they are each marking the passage from one state of being to another, seeking some form of comfort and succor for those left behind.  

I was reminded of the power of such rituals as I reported from the U.S./Mexico border in the summer of 2024. While in Tijuana — a coastal border city in Mexico, just south of California — I visited a shrine dedicated to an “unlikely saint”: Juan Soldado.  

Situated near the middle of Panteón Municipal #1, a city cemetery in Tijuana’s Zona Norte neighborhood, a red brick chapel is built over the tomb of Juan Castillo Morales. The shrine is covered wall-to-wall with candles, flowers, plaques with names and messages of thanks and a stylized bust of a young soldier, resplendent in military attire. This is the infamous Juan Soldado, one of the many unofficial saints where loved ones remember lives of migrants lost trying to make their way north through the U.S./Mexico borderlands.  

A soldier executed by Mexican authorities on February 17, 1938, for the rape and murder of Olga Camacho Martínez, a young girl buried in a cemetery just up the road, William Calvo-Quirós, a professor of American and Latinx Studies at the University of Michigan, said the murderer, rapist and soldier Juan Castillo transformed over time into Juan Soldado, a “folk saint” who is venerated as a victim of state violence. 

There at Juan’s shrine, I met Rosalba Ruiz-Hernandez, a 46-year-old mother of five. Originally from the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, Rosalba was deported back to Tijuana after her own failed attempt to start a new life in the U.S. Two of Rosalba’s grown children still live in Long Beach, California near her former husband. They are undocumented but make a living, she said. Two others are in Tijuana with her. Matías, her middle son, died in the desert on his way north to join his siblings in Southern California.  

She was there that mid-May morning to mark the death of her son and to pray for those she was still so far away from. “I come to Juanito’s chapel to give thanks for the children who have their new life in Long Beach” Rosalba said, “and to pray for Matías’ soul.”  

Placing a flower near Juan Soldado’s bust within the shrine, Rosalba’s prayers were for many crossings — from one country to another, from one life to the next. They were, in the words of religion scholar Thomas Tweed, locative, translocative and supralocative — religious practices that situated Rosalba, her loved ones and their experience in a particular place (a cemetery in Tijuana), multiple spaces at once (the U.S., Mexico, and somewhere between) and in the cosmic realms of heaven and hell.  

Rosalba is far from alone in needing to mark the death of the unseen, and unfound, lost in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Their deaths, though not marked with traditional funerals or other rituals of loss and remembrance, are memorialized in a variety of ways. From chapels  

erected around the graves of unofficial saints, like Juan,  to digital memorials people carry with them into the desert or the crosses, flowers and other mementoes left along the border boundary itself, these monuments not only pay tribute to the individuals lost, but bear witness to the persistent ubiquity of death — and faith — in America’s southwestern states.  

In his book Undocumented Saints, Calvo-Quirós explores many such migratory devotions, in lands and lives where death is omnipresent. From the normalization of devotion to Santa Muerte — or Saint Death — to promises made to Juan Soldado on behalf of those migrating north, Calvo-Quirós said, he is not surprised to see an increase in devotion to unofficial saints.  

“At a time when policies of death have become the norm for many people, religious practices help people deal with a life where death may be the best thing that can happen to you,” he said. “In such tectonic places where the tensions of life and death have to be navigated, religion gives people a way to deal with an imperfect world,” he said, “it helps them figure out a way to find a good life in a place of death.”  

And, in that, Calvo-Quirós said, we might all learn from rituals of death along the U.S./Mexico border. “Economic exploitation, a healthcare system that fails us, education that fails us, a city that is not built to sustain those who live there, this is not the world we are meant to be living in,” he said. In that sense, Calvo-Quirós said, we are all looking for better ways to live and better ways to die, knowing that we live in “haunted lands” where unevenness and inequality mean we are more likely to die unjustly, to die alone, or to die and be forgotten.  

Ministering to the “unclaimed” dead 

For authors Stefan Timmermans, Pamela Prickett, and Mirian Martinez-Aranda, migrant deaths are also made “unclaimable,” with relatives having “no opportunity to bury deceased according to their cultural and religious customs.” According to their research, “migration policies to funnel unauthorized border crossers into the Sonoran Desert” have not only “made crossings more lethal…but also deprive relatives from culturally salient mourning traditions.”  

That status as “unclaimable” becomes even more remarkable when compared to the dead who are left “unclaimed” in Los Angeles County, the subject of a recent book by Timmermans and Prickett.  

In The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope in the City of Angels, the two sociologists trace the lives of four individuals left unclaimed upon their death. Not only carefully reconstructing the winding paths of fractured families, societal inequality and social isolation that led to an unclaimed corpse lying in repose at a city morgue or buried with hundreds of other unclaimed souls in a mass grave in East Los Angeles, the authors also comment on the general state of death and dying in America.  

Talking to crematorium workers, chaplains, scene investigators, notification officers, as well as friends and family of the deceased, Timmermans and Prickett make plain, with touching texture and lucid empathy, how anyone can be abandoned to death in the 21st-century U.S.  

Religious actors, communities, rituals, hopes and fears weave in and out of the narrative, providing a spiritual through-line to the biographies Timmermans and Prickett tell. Beyond generic references to “God” at the graveside and importance of individual spirituality to many readers meet along the way, two of the dead remembered in the book had deep ties to faith communities. Inez “Midge” Gonzales was dependent on, and deeply involved with her Westchester Church of the Nazarene community and David Spencer, a U.S. Navy veteran who identified as a Scientologist and had very strong beliefs about what should happen to his body and what would happen to his body and “soul” based on the early teachings of L. Ron Hubbard.  

To Prickett, whose first book was about a mosque in Los Angeles’ predominately Black South-Central neighborhood, this is no surprise. “Even if it’s not the first thing that comes to mind about Los Angeles,” Prickett said, “a diverse range of religions and spiritualities are very active in the city.”  

Particularly when it comes to death, Prickett said regardless of where Angelenos are at with faith in their life, at the moment someone dies, or someone faces death, religion becomes more salient than in years past. “In some ways, religion has a near monopoly on helping us think through what death means and how we should ritualize the loss of a life,” she said.  

This is also true for the unclaimed, Prickett said. “When there is a ceremony to mark the death of the unclaimed, often officials — even in the city government — draw on religious language, symbols and tropes to make sense of the death and fill in the gaps of what we know and don’t know,” she said.  

People do not always know what to say or to do when someone dies. That uncertainty is compounded at the graveside of the unclaimed. That is why, Prickett said, at the annual county burial of the unclaimed in a cemetery in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood east of downtown Los Angeles, religion features prominently — and diversely.  

Every year since 1896, Los Angeles County has held a somber ceremony for the men, women and children who die there, but whose bodies are never claimed. Father Chris Ponnet, a Catholic priest who has led the interfaith ceremony for two decades, shepherds the service, which features various leaders reciting the Lord’s Prayer in English, Spanish, Hebrew, Korean, Fijian or Tagalog. A Hindu prayer might be read, a Buddhist chant shared and a Tongva song sung as a bundle of sage is lit as a blessing.

At such times of communal mourning and doubt, Prickett said, “religion offers a language and a sense of shared humanity, to establish the ability to come together across differences.”  

The ability to come together across differences and provide care in times of need was a prominent theme in the book, Prickett said. But it’s also a poignant issue for people across the U.S. to consider. “We are on the cusp of a million or more older people dying without kin or family,” Prickett said. “The country, the structures we have in place, can’t do enough to care for them. We have to work together to provide new systems of care.”  

That’s because, fundamentally, we need each other, she said. “We are becoming increasingly individualistic — taking individualism to whole new levels of isolation,” Prickett said, “but that just won’t work. We have to have connection and care.”   

Interfaith realities, interfaith deaths 

There is, however, room for hope as far as Prickett is concerned. And interfaith practitioners may provide a key to providing the structures of care more Americans will need as they face the prospects of dying alone or being estranged from loved ones lost. Beyond Father Ponnet, Prickett said she met multiple interfaith practitioners who are reimagining their callings to care for the vulnerable and provide care across difference.  

In fact, as research from sociologist Wendy Cadge shows, for many young people, their first encounter with spiritual care and religious leadership often comes through the ministry of a chaplain. And chaplains, she said, are consummate interfaith professionals.  

“Most all of the work chaplains do has become more inter-faith in recent decades,” Cadge said. “In hospitals, for example, most chaplains are staffed to serve everyone on certain units rather than seeing only patients of their own faith throughout the hospital.  

“The training chaplains receive also explicitly prepares them to support everyone, including those who do not consider themselves spiritual or religious,” she said.  

Trace Haythorn, co-founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, said chaplains are often assumed to be the religious leaders present at the time of death, especially in healthcare and military settings.  

 Most chaplaincy education includes some awareness of key religious elements regarding the dying process, practices at the time of death, and religious requirements immediately following a death, he said. “While chaplains may facilitate the provision of particular rites or religious items for those whom they serve, they are trained not to impose their own tradition on those people,” Haythorn said. That is as true at death as at any other time in the cycle of a chaplain’s care.  

That means chaplains have stepped in, Haythorn said, to fill in the gaps left by the decline of Mainline Protestant traditions and to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse, pluralistic religious landscape. And accompanying individuals, families and those who serve them through the time of death, “places chaplains in a profound and deeply meaningful place with the general public,” Haythorn said.  

With that level of connection and trust at the time of dying and death, Haythorn said he would not be surprised if chaplaincy becomes the primary or ascendant form of religious leadership or service in the U.S. within the next decades. 

This, Prickett said, is always what she has seen interfaith practitioners doing in her research. “They draw on core similarities, find the common ground, and create spaces to engage religion among those who don’t necessarily share the same convictions,” she said.  

This, Prickett said, is more important as we face the next phase of the American project and the coming decades of death in the U.S. and its borderlands.