A Little Help with Burying the Dead

Janice Pietruszynski was a resident of a group home when Susan Liermann met her. Janice was nonverbal and wheelchair bound, and Susan was not sure whether she had been abandoned, or outlived her parents, or if there was some other story. “I was her nurse that monitored her care,” says Susan, who worked for Creative Community Living Services (CCLS) at the time.

For more than fifty years, CCLS has provided individualized community support for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, mental illness, physical disabilities, and functional limitations of aging. Since 2017, it has operated as a nonprofit organization.

Susan nursed Janice for about a year. Then, “When I returned from vacation in October, I learned Janice had been hospitalized at Saint Joseph's and was not expected to survive.”

Judging by Janice’s Polish last name, Susan thought it likely that she came from a Catholic background, but didn’t know if she had been baptized. “I asked the hospital priest to baptize her and administer last rites which he did. When she passed, I attended her wake with the owner of the group home.” Susan placed a rosary in Janice’s hands for the funeral.

After that, “Janice was to be cremated. However, since they used her funeral benefit for a viewing and then cremation, she could not then also have a burial spot.”

The funeral benefit comes through the State of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Funeral and Cemetery Aid Program (WFCAP) provides modest sums to funeral homes and cemeteries when someone has no other means of paying. In Wisconsin, cremation is considered “final disposition,” which means that whoever performs the cremation can claim the cemetery portion of the available state funding, leaving nothing for cemetery expenses. That puts good-hearted people like Susan in a tough spot.

If Susan didn’t take them, Janice’s “ashes would be unclaimed. So I claimed them, and have had them here ever since.” Her initial thought was to scatter Janice’s remains in a beautiful, peaceful place that she knew of, but a colleague remarked, “that’s pollution!” so Susan paused those plans. Legally, scattering cremated remains on someone else’s property, including public property, without written permission is littering. Scattering at a cemetery is not only littering but violates the law that no remains may be placed in a cemetery without permission of the cemetery authority.

More than a decade passed. Then, “When I heard about Lay Them to Rest, I was glad I had not scattered Janice’s remains at the lake as I had originally planned,” says Susan. Lay Them to Rest offers free burial of cremated remains that, for whatever reason, have not been buried. Following this year’s Lay Them to Rest committal service, Janice’s remains now lie in the Sacred Heart of Jesus Crypt at Resurrection Cemetery in Madison.

There are many different ways someone might come into the possession of cremated remains and sometimes it is difficult to know what to do next, especially if no cemetery plans have been made. Lay Them to Rest is an annual program offered by the Department of Cemeteries of the Diocese of Madison, made possible by generous donors to the Annual Catholic Appeal.

For more information about Lay Them to Rest, visit. www.madisondiocese.org/rest. For more information about the Annual Catholic Appeal, visit https://madisondiocese.org/aca. 

A version of this article appeared in the February 27, 2025 edition of the Madison Catholic Herald.