The corpses of four men will be buried by the health authorities in the coming days and it is very likely no mourners will be present on the occasion.
In a chilling notice on The Malta Government Gazette, Mater Dei Hospital listed the names of four men who will be laid to rest by next week because the “permitted time for a claim to organise a private burial” had expired.
While no details about the four men were supplied in the official gazette, their ID card numbers suggest two of them were Maltese and another was Gozitan.
The fourth, whose surname is not Maltese, had a so-called provisional ID card, which meant he had never provided the state with a birth certificate.
While the passing away of loved ones is normally followed by newspaper announcements, meticulously-planned funerals and sober burials, this will not be the case for the four men.
Instead, within 10 days of the official notice, the unclaimed bodies will be buried in an unceremonious funeral funded by the State or the personal account of the deceased in what is known as a pauper’s burial.
The older people get, the more solitude and loneliness trends increase
The passing on of responsibility for these lonesome bodies to the State falls under what is known as the Paupers’ Burial Protocol, legislation dating back to the 1960s, which is still in force today. According to figures supplied to Times of Malta last year, there were about 218 bodies over the past decade for which nobody came forward to organise a private burial.
A hospital officer had said the authorities made it a point to treat the people with dignity, insisting that even though nobody had come forward to claim them, they still deserved respect.
The unclaimed bodies are usually buried in a special lot at the Santa Maria Addolorata Cemetery in Paola.
The first national study on solitude, published in May this year, showed that two out of every five Maltese aged 11 and over suffer from loneliness.
The findings also showed that the older people get, the more solitude and loneliness trends increase and at least two out of every 100 people suffered from severe or very severe loneliness.