‘Folks Ought To Have a Resting Place’

November 2025

Jesus couldn’t afford his own tomb, and neither can thousands of people in this country. A modern funeral costs around $7,000 while the median savings for Americans in 2025 was $8,000—with many people living and dying with far less. Common U.S. practices around death, such as embalming and concrete vaults, take a huge toll not only on people’s finances but also on the environment, leaching harmful chemicals into the earth and slowing the natural process of decomposition.

Jubilee Partners, an intentional Christian community best known for its work welcoming refugees and asylum seekers, keeps a simple cemetery on its 260-acre wooded property. In addition to reducing environmental impact and financial strain, the Jubilee cemetery offers a glimpse of radical hospitality and love of neighbors, even to the very end.

Cemeteries, like just about everything in the United States, tend to be separated, by design or by default, into categories of ethnicity, religion, and class. But the 40 people buried in the Jubilee cemetery comprise a unique underground community wherein those walls of difference crumble beneath a layer of red clay and dirt shaded by a canopy of sweet gum, cedar, and pine. Of the 26 men and 14 women buried there, six died on Georgia’s death row, seven were homeless, 14 came to the U.S. as refugees, several served as pastors and missionaries, one held a Ph.D., some were illiterate, and many found solace and connection during their lives in the offbeat community that named itself after the biblical celebration of Jubilee.

The Jubilee cemetery offers a glimpse of radical hospitality and love of neighbors, even to the very end.

For several years, I lived and worked at Jubilee Partners in Comer, Ga., with my husband, Michael, and our four children; we still live nearby. In 2011, about a month before my family arrived, the community buried Roy Blankenship, a man executed by lethal injection on Georgia’s death row. Blankenship’s funeral, like many Jubilee funerals, was attended by Jubilee residents and people from their sister communities: The Open Door Community, a “Protestant Catholic Worker” that offered hospitality to homeless people in Atlanta, and New Hope House, a guest house for family members of people on death row in Georgia. Murphy Davis, a Presbyterian minister and co-founder of the Open Door, gave the eulogy.

Robbie Buller, who has lived at Jubilee since January 1980, has attended most of the Jubilee burials. When I interviewed him for an oral history project a few years ago, he said the cemetery “has become a ... final hospitality for people who have had trouble finding acceptance anyplace else.”

One of my husband’s first jobs at Jubilee was to work with volunteers—in the August heat—to hand-dig the next grave. When the laborious work was finally done, they covered it with a piece of metal roofing and a blue tarp. It remained empty until January 2014, when an elderly woman named Poe Ker Lay passed away. She was among several dozen Karen and Karenni people from Myanmar who began resettling in and around Jubilee in the 2010s. The birthday on her grave marker is Jan. 1, the default birth date for a disproportionate number of immigrants who, fleeing war without documentation, needed to write something down.

Poe Ker Lay died on a Monday morning, the simple pine coffin was built on Tuesday, and her funeral service was in her living room on Wednesday. After the funeral, a group of people carried her coffin to an old green pickup truck. The tires crunched along a mile of gravel road into a field of blackberry bushes and young scuppernong vines. The truck parked, and a group of men carried her coffin up a wooded path to a clearing with a crop of cement crosses and granite slabs.

At her burial, I took a first and final look at Poe Ker Lay’s face. It bore no mark of an undertaker’s professional touch; she looked dead. My 3-year-old daughter, safe in her father’s arms, looked at our neighbor’s sunken cheeks and ashy skin while congregants sang and recited a final prayer. They slid the coffin lid back on and nailed it firmly in place. I looked up at the lattice of pine branches above and over to my young daughter, who seemed unperturbed by this, her first glimpse of human death. Six men, like sailors, gripped the heavy line as they lowered the coffin, hand over hand, until it hit ground. Everyone present tossed in fistfuls of dirt or grabbed a shovel to fill the hole.

The day after her burial, about 25 men from the local Karen community came to dig the next grave. By lunchtime, they were done, and a new space was ready. In 2017, after more than six years at Jubilee, my family and I moved away for many reasons. It wasn’t completely how we wanted to live. But I was sure of one thing, whether it be at Jubilee or somewhere else: This is how I want to die.

A place for Jesús and men on death row

JUBILEE COMMUNITY, WITH a dozen or so long-term residents plus residential volunteers, was established in 1979. A year later, Jesús Torres, 48, a refugee from Cuba, died on Christmas Day. The Jubilee residents had built their own homes and other buildings, but they hadn’t expected to need a cemetery so quickly. One of the co-founders, Don Mosley, a trained engineer, mapped out a suitable section in a southwestern corner of the property: far enough from neighbors, above the 100-year-flood line, and with room to grow. Laws about establishing burial plots vary by state, but it was not difficult for Jubilee to secure a permit from the county to rezone that portion. Jubilee residents buried Torres where they themselves hope to be buried one day.

Jubilee’s founders had moved there from Koinonia Farm in Americus, Ga., a Christian community that had helped birth Habitat for Humanity. A Koinonia founder, Clarence Jordan, is buried at Koinonia, along with his wife and daughter, on the edge of a pecan orchard, with his words on their marker: “God has made us out of this old soil and we go back to it, and we never lose its claim on us.”

William “Pop” Campbell was the first death row inmate buried at Jubilee. In December 1975, Campbell murdered a barber. After his arrest he accused an innocent man of carrying out the murder and robbery with him. That innocent man, Henry Drake, was on death row because of Campbell’s false testimony.

Murphy Davis of the Open Door Community befriended many men facing capital punishment, including Campbell. During one of those visits, Campbell confessed that he had lied about Drake. On a subsequent visit, in 1981, Davis brought a notary public with her and asked Campbell to share his story again. Davis wrote his words and read them back to him, since he was illiterate: “... What I said were lies. I was the one who killed Mr. Eberhart. Henry wasn’t even there.”

Campell died of natural causes in March 1983, while Drake remained on death row for a crime he had not committed, despite legal pleas and appeals based on Campbell’s statement. Drake’s mother came to Jubilee for Campbell’s burial, not knowing if her son would ever be set free. As Jubilee’s Robbie Buller remembered it: “She just said a few words at the graveside: ‘I know that this man lied against my son. I know that my son is on death row because this man lied against him, but I don’t have it in my heart to hate him. I have to forgive him because the hate is just going to eat me alive if I hold on to it. So, I have to forgive him.’”

“It made a lasting impact on me,” Buller said, “and affected a lot of how I began to think about victims of violence, what the purpose of the death penalty is, and how it’s used in this country.”

Drake was finally released in 1987.

In some states, death row inmates whose families cannot afford burial are buried on prison grounds, with only their prisoner number to mark their graves. Between 1983 and 1987, the state of Georgia executed 12 men; four of them are buried at Jubilee. Jubilee later established a burial fund, giving inmate’s families more choices. Buller and Al Lawler, another resident partner at Jubilee have visited men on Georgia’s death row for more than three decades, but none of the men they have gotten to know personally are buried there.

In some states, death row inmates are buried on prison grounds, with only their prisoner number marking their graves.

“Esta es para mi madre”

DURING THE ’80s, Jubilee Partners hosted several hundred Central Americans fleeing U.S.-funded wars. As part of the larger “overground railroad” sanctuary movement, Jubilee helped transport people from the border, through the U.S. (which did not acknowledge them as legal refugees), and toward amnesty in Canada.

Having escaped death squads and government persecution, many of the Central Americans, when they learned about Jubilee’s burial ministry, insisted on helping to dig graves for death row inmates. “They knew what it was like to lose a family member to state-sponsored killing,” Buller said. He said one man used “a litany through all of his digging ... with each swing he would say ‘Esta es para mi madre, esta es para mi padre’” (“This is for my mother, this is for my father”), naming several more people as he worked through the rocky soil.

During these funerals, ministers and lawyers who had built relationships with the condemned men spoke about the whole person being buried, not the worst act they had done or the way the state killed them. Some of the men at the funerals who were from the Open Door had lived significant parts of their lives on the streets of Atlanta. They were so moved by these services that they requested that they too be buried at Jubilee. It was through personal experience with the cemetery that nine people from the Open Door, including three former staff, were buried there. (Davis died in 2020, and her ashes were buried at Jubilee in 2024, not far from the death row inmates and formerly homeless men she had befriended in life and helped to bury.)

Even when no one at Jubilee personally knew the decedent, every burial was dignified. Les Ortman, a retired pastor and father of Jubilee resident Blake Ortman, officiated the 1996 funeral of Steven Anderson, a man who died homeless. His body had lain unclaimed for three weeks in the local county morgue and arrived on Maundy Thursday, making his burial a memorable addition to Holy Week. Ten years later, Les Ortman’s wife, Hope, was buried beside Anderson at Jubilee.

Two years after his wife’s death, Ortman died while visiting family in Texas. On the same day, Francine Ndayisenga, a 27-year-old refugee from Burundi who was living at Jubilee, died unexpectantly. While Ortman’s family drove his body home to Georgia, Ndayisenga’s bereaved family worked with the community to dig graves. For Blake Ortman, having Ndayisenga’s family at his father’s funeral was especially meaningful because his family had lived in central Africa as missionaries from 1957 to 1960. Hymns in English, Karen, and Kirundi filled the air while the community shared the common language and common ground of grief.

Grave-digging for the double funeral in 2008 was hard, requiring a rented jackhammer and backhoe to break through huge rocks. Lawler, who serves as the point person for the Jubilee cemetery, recalls that the community seized the opportunity to dig a third grave with the rented backhoe. That grave stayed empty until Blankenship was buried several years later. Jubilee’s practice of hand-digging a grave in advance, immediately following a burial, started with the one my husband helped dig in 2011. Since then, 22 more people have been buried at Jubilee; 10 of them have Jan. 1 birthdays on their grave markers.

‘Folks ought to have a resting place’

THE 45-YEAR-OLD CEMETERY holds many more stories: Ed and Mary Ruth Weir, co-founders of Jubilee and directors of New Hope House; the Comer neighbor who sang “O Holy Night” at every town Christmas tree lighting; the volunteer firefighter and environmentalist who helped Jubilee find their plot of land; the young mother who died from cancer and the young father who died from suicide; and the friend of the community who died in a house fire. Some could have afforded burial elsewhere but chose Jubilee because of years of connection. Other families, faced with many difficult choices they weren’t prepared for, knew that paying for a burial would not be one of them.

Lawler, 82, a retired English professor with a gray beard and gravelly voice, has lived at Jubilee since 1994 and has served as point person for the cemetery since 2013. Recently, Jason Frederick, 34, who began working at Jubilee in 2023, began shadowing Lawler to learn the role of cemetery keeper. He worked as a landscaper in a cemetery for one summer and laughed when he wondered aloud if that qualified him.

Earlier this year, Scott Berry, the newly elected Madison County coroner, drove the black coroner’s van to Jubilee on a Monday in April, the beginning of Holy Week, with 15 boxes labeled “Cremated Remains.”

“When I took this job,” Berry explained, “I inherited every one of these and they were just sitting on the shelf in the coroner’s morgue, and I just don’t think that’s right.” Someone suggested that he call Jubilee for help. “Folks ought to have a resting place,” he added.

The number of unclaimed bodies in the U.S. is increasing due to estrangement, poverty, addiction, and mental illness.

“There’s 15 stories right here,” Lawler said, after he helped unload the boxes, “and we don’t know the details.” According to sociologists Pamela Prickett and Stefan Timmermans, authors of The Unclaimed, the number of unclaimed bodies and ashes in the U.S. is increasing due to factors including estrangement, poverty, addiction, and mental illness.

I did some digging through files and records to try to find some answers. Two of the boxes were empty, and I was able to confirm where the ashes had gone. The remains in two others were identified and given to loved ones; 11 boxes remain. One empty grave won’t suffice, so the community is figuring out exactly where, when, and how to mark these new graves. Until then, the boxes sit in a corner of the community library, waiting to be put to rest in this quiet place of welcome.