Flying Home to Rest in Peace
(part 1 of 3)

PHOTO: freefoto.com

hen funeral director Richard Ruggiero first suggested expanding into the shipping business, his family thought he was crazy. But, he reasoned, in a city where the majority of people are from someplace else, some might need to travel in order to rest in peace.

Robert Ruggiero, president of the Empire State Shipping Company.

"We had noticed this trend of people migrating," Ruggiero recalls. So in 1977, Ruggiero and his brothers started Empire State Shipping Co., which specializes in returning remains overseas, a process known as repatriation. The business now runs in conjunction with the funeral home started by their great-grandfather in 1875.

Before long, other funeral homes were calling Empire for help in shipping remains abroad, he says. In the ensuing years, he says, his company has become adept at navigating the different regulations foreign governments insist be met before a body can be accepted, some of which are holdovers from the days of steamships when a transatlantic journey could take weeks.

The president of the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, Brian Kasler, says the repatriation business directly reflects immigration trends in the city.

"The question is: Do you have a home to go back to, or are you already home?" he says.

Heavy immigration to the United States – and to New York City in particular – means that, although many people moved here to seek out a better life, many still have strong ties to their homeland. As Ruggiero says: "We all come from somewhere else." He says that the vast majority of people who wish to be repatriated for burial are first- or second- generation immigrants.

"They’ll call us up and sometimes they don’t speak English and have to put their grandkid on the phone," he says.

Salvatore "Buddy" Scotto, owner and funeral director of Scotto Funeral Home in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn-- long known as an Italian enclave-- says that he’s seeing fewer people requesting repatriation.

"It’s less than it used to be," he says. "Immigration from Italy has gone down to a trickle and there is less connection back to Italy. More families consider America home."

hile the demand for repatriation to European countries may be dwindling, there has been an increase in repatriations to the homelands of New York’s newest immigrants, mostly people from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa.

Ruggiero has experience dealing with a wide array of countries, from Albania to Zimbabwe. He says the countries to which people wish to be repatriated have changed over the years. In recent years, he has dealt increasingly with people from countries such as Ecuador, El Salvador and Russia, representing a new influx of immigrants to the formerly Irish and Italian Bronx neighborhood of Morris Park.

"A lot of immigrants are coming here for a chance to better their existence," Ruggiero says. "And they want to go home [when they pass away]."

According to the New York State Health Department, the agency responsible for licensing the funeral industry, there are currently 2,035 licensed funeral firms in the state. All funeral directors are licensed to ship remains, both domestically and internationally, according to Mary Ann Carroll a spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, which covers New York City and Westchester County. However, some destinations are more complicated than others, she says, and, as a result, there are few companies that specialize in the business of shipping remains.