You don’t need your last resting place to be a lifeless letter workplace, however sadly that’s the place 452 individuals have discovered themselves, spending eternity as undeliverable mail with the U.S. Postal Service.

USPS Workplace of Inspector Normal launched a Cremated Stays report this week detailing failures inside the publish workplace to ship these former people to their supposed last locations. Based on Vice:

The USPS is the one authorized solution to ship cremated stays. Not less than in idea, the USPS has strict procedures for dealing with such delicate and irreplaceable packages. Stays have to be shipped by way of Precedence Mail Specific and have an enormous orange sticker hooked up to the facet of the field (the sticker was teal). They’re additionally presupposed to be dealt with otherwise than different Precedence Mail Specific packages.

Nevertheless, the OIG report discovered some or all of those procedures are usually not completed between 28 and 50 % of the time, which may go a way in the direction of explaining how 452 cremated stays containers ended up within the USPS’s warehouse for misplaced packages. Based on the report, “as of February 27, 2023, the MRC [Mail Recovery Center] had 452 undeliverable and/or unidentifiable Cremated Stays packages,” the oldest being there since February 24, 2015.

Whereas there’s nothing to concern from human stays, it’s a sorry destiny to spend your last resting place bouncing across the federal system. Such packages are presupposed to be clearly marked as needing additional care whereas dealing with, however the USPS examine discovered this wasn’t all the time the case. Even when packages have been clearly marked, they weren’t all the time dealt with appropriately by staff in postal services. Misplaced packages find yourself on the Mail Restoration Middle, a form of Misplaced and Discovered for undeliverable packages. Often packages that linger within the MRC for over 60 days are then both thrown away or auctioned off on the GovDeals web site if they’re price over $25.

That is luckily not the case with human stays. However since nobody fairly is aware of what to do with the undeliverable stays, they only stack up.

The report makes suggestions and factors out good practices from among the publish workplaces, however there appears to be no instant answer or decision for the 452 human stays misplaced within the machines of presidency.