Pennsylvania Story Highlights Very Real Problems of Unclaimed Remains and Unpaid Bills … and a Possible Solution

Jeffrey Butya was something of a local celebrity in the Robinson Township community of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Described in a February 12, 2025 tribute as a “local bar and grill manager, former rock ‘n roll roadie and perhaps most notably, one of the most unforgettable walk-ons in Penn State football history,” seemed to have made an impression on all who crossed his path. 

When Butya passed away on Friday, February 7 after suffering a stroke two months earlier, his family members were overwhelmed by the outpouring of condolences. Although he had never married and had no children, Butya and his uncle, brother, and sister-in-law were longtime owners and operators of several beloved family-owned taverns and neighborhood bars. It was Cassie Butya, the widow of Jeffrey Butya’s late brother Ken, who shared with the West Hill Gazette on February 12 that there would be no public viewing for Jeffrey, but that she and her sons would be announcing a “memorial get-together” when details were finalized.

In the public eye

Fast forward to last week — July 19, 2025, to be exact. This was the day Frank Garland, Partner and Editor at the West Hills Gazette, and the author who penned the beautiful tribute to Butya in the same paper on February 12, wrote an update piece entitled, “Unclaimed remains: The fate of Jeff Butya’s ashes.”

Garland shared a truly sad story — but one that is not at all foreign to deathcare professionals. The cremated remains of Jeffrey Butya were still in the custody of Thomas-Little Funeral Service Inc. and Crematory — along with an unpaid bill of $3,285 for the removal and direct cremation services that were authorized by Butya’s brother Brian in February. 

Five months in limbo

There had been no memorial get-togethers for the man who was known as “Booty” by his friends. In fact, the funeral home had achieved very little contact with the family, according to Thomas-Little funeral director Mya Garrett. Despite Brian Butya’s promises to “sell a couple of things” to pay the balance on February 17, and then stopped returning Garrett’s calls, which she placed on a weekly basis. Garrett had the same results with Jeffrey Butya’s sister-in-law, although Cassie Butya did contact the funeral home via email in April and responded to Garland’s email in June.

In these correspondences, Cassie Butya shared that her brother-in-law had left no will, no life insurance, or a power of attorney, and that the situation was “complex and delicate.” She added that she was not truly “connected” to the Butya family as she had remarried and was “not involved in any part of the funeral planning and decisions.” Lastly, she told the funeral home that “while she had the ‘utmost respect for Jeff and sympathize with the situation, funeral expenses are typically a personal responsibility and not one assumed by the employer. As such, we are not in a position to cover the outstanding balance.’”

Not as uncommon as one might think

Garrett told the Gazette that this was only the third time in 30 years that a family had failed to pay for a cremation or pick up their loved one’s cremains. She added that if no one claimed Butya’s remains, they would be buried in a community vault for unclaimed remains in a local cemetery.

Garland’s article included statements from representatives of the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association and the Pennsylvania Department of State about the growing problem of unclaimed remains and the lack of mandatory holding periods in most states. 

It was clear from the story that Garrett and her team at Thomas-Little went above and beyond what regulations might have mandated in her quest to reunite Jeffrey Butya’s remains with his family. She had reached out to everyone she could, including Jeffrey’s elderly father, George, who lived in a community care facility, and had created a GoFundMe page for donations toward the bill. As of July 19, the balance in the GoFundMe account was zero.

An unexpected result

That all changed after Garland published his article in the West Hills Gazette. The following day, in an article entitled “Family steps up to claim Jeff Butya’s ashes,” Garland reported that a family member had paid the outstanding balance and a nephew would be picking up the remains. The family member was none other than Cassie Butya, and the nephew was one of her sons. That nephew asked that the $70 that was donated to the GoFundMe account after Garland’s story was published be given to charity. 

“This is what needed to happen,” funeral director Mya Garrett said. “I’m glad someone stepped up for him and he’s going home.”

Lessons learned?

So, would publicly sharing a story about the unclaimed remains and unpaid bills in your funeral home result in a similar successful outcome? Maybe, but maybe not. Considering privacy laws, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and the potential for defamation or libel accusations, it can be a slippery slope. However, in the case of Jeffrey Butya, Garland’s article appears to be a true human interest piece — a follow-up about a beloved community member and the sad fate of his remains. No matter what the intentions of the author, the end result of a zero balance, a donation to charity, and the reunion of Butya’s cremains with his family certainly seems worthwhile.

Is Total Death Even Real? Mathematicians Suggest It’s All an Illusion

Higher mathematics suggests that maybe there is “no death.” Could it be an illusion?

Come on, now. Sounds cryptically new age-y… but there’s hard research behind it. It’s hard to accept, this — if there isn’t death, what’s going on during putrescence? What’s with all these skeletal remains?

That depends on what “death” really means.

‘Tis All About Me

Did you know that the way our vision cells, the rods and cones in our eyes, interpret sunlight is the only reason we see a blue sky? The sky, in fact, isn’t blue at all — space, you probably know, is black, and so is the sky.

But the way our cells work shows us a blue sky. The sky “is” blue (colorblindness and other conditions notwithstanding) only because of how human eyes do their job. It’s just what we’ve got.

This phenomenon of highly-curated experience, dependent in every nuance on physiology, is known as biocentrism. Biocentrism says that if you’re a biological life form, you can only see the part of reality touching your own (biological) nature. But that little part is not all of reality in toto.

We’ve understood for how long that we have (at least) five senses that interpret our surroundings? Long time, bro. That we experience things not as they are, but as we are is an old adage. We know our limits… or some of them.

But biocentrism posits that the balance of reality we don’t see or experience – the rest of the environment, that which is not biology-adjacent, the whole context of absolutely everything we know and don’t know – biocentrism says that this meta-reality which biological beings occupy and perceive minimally,  in smidges, is barely scratched by biology-based concepts like “time” and “space.”

It’s still an incipient (ha!) field, researching the nature not only of human experience, but of what lies beyond it. It asks, What could be the raw material our senses draw from, which is beyond them and all of their sense-based concepts, including those we name “time” and “space”?

If time and space — central aspects of our idea of death — turn out to be structurally load-bearing ideas integral to our experience of life (and death) as we know them, that are, at base, nothing more than twee bio-cognitive sensory exercises, they’re not the profound parameters of truth we take them for.

They’re the human thought edition of a five-year old playing grown up in mommy’s high heels. They’re just another of our biology’s ways of seeing, a “bio-logic” woven from the willy-nilly bits and bobs our senses collect.

“Time” and “space” are valid as a “blue” sky.

AITA?

So based on human experience of time as a sense of things happening in consequence of each other, in order, in a line marching ever forward, death appears to us an ending.

We’ve come up with an explanation of what looks like events happening one after another… meeting, dating, wedding; an event like disease or trauma, then a human’s state of non-responsiveness, then a state of putrescence. All rely on our (human) sense of time.

To get to the idea of death as an illusion, we need a reality with flexible requirements of time.

It’s hard to conceptualize being outside of time. How does one do that?

Physics Defending the Soul?

Quantum physics, with its reputation for weirdness, has the mathematical chops to redefine spacetime’s role in the equation, so to speak. This is the hard science’s equivalent of Alice’s Wonderland, ever so unexpectedly dreamlike. When you bite on quantum physics and shrink to its Drink Me scale of bitty molecular pieces of atoms, we find marvelous things, oddities and wonders, a fantastical place where matter behaves in what should be impossible ways. Things which should not be, according to the Eat Me proportions where most of us plod around, where stuff makes the dull, pedestrian, workaday, full-size mortal sense we accept for the final word on the matter.

We’re living with this view of a single reality like Americans who speak only English in a polyglot world, forgoing the richness of human views of the features of things like snow, psychology, morality, emotion, even diety, that different languages of different cultures in different geological contexts view different  environments in ultimately unique ways. Speaking only a single language limits exposure to a range of human interpretations of the elements of the world we all know, or can know, and how we might know it.

And biocentrism is, clearly, a lot bigger than idiom or lexicon.

If death’s ending is an event not limited to linear time (because, remember, biology), then what we perceive and call death isn’t actually the end it seems to be.

It’s a bit spectral and diffuse, this idea, the implications are interesting. Those with religious tendencies may find the idea easy, second nature, to accept, as it’s suggestive of a sort of elemental eternity, which is already a concept long held central to multiple belief systems (an immortal soul is foundational to Christianity in all its forms, Judaism, Islam, as well as many of the less mainstream systems including many Native American spiritual traditions, Witchcraft in various formats, Taoism, and Hinduism, for example). 

Deathlessness, in this sense, may (in its own expression of duality) simultaneously be a nice and profoundly distressing idea, depending on which way your sense of eternity leans.

As to the ultimate nature of the unguessable reality, only “time” or Heisenberg will tell.

5 Funeral Products We CAN’T Believe are Real | FFFW 204

DISCLAIMER: None of the F’s in FFFW stand for “facts.” Enjoy the jokes and satire.

Happy Friday the 13th! If your weather is anything like mine, it looks like we’ve officially entered spooky season on the right day!

Better live streaming for your families

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All you have to do is schedule a stream, share links with friends and family, and go live using your mobile phone! The best part? Your stream and recording are hosted directly on your obituary.

However, livestreaming your funerals doesn’t just impact your families; it helps your funeral home beat local competition with 10% more calls per year, more traffic to your website, and improved SEO.

Want to learn more about how livestreaming can impact your business? Click the link below for a free demo.

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Five Funeral Products that Seem Fake but are REALLY real

We see a lot of wild products in this space—here are a few of my favorites.

Pumpkin Spice Casket

Yes, this is real. From the minds of Titan, the “Pumpkin Spice Casket” seems to be a dope orange casket with a great marketing plan. Check it out here.

Coffin Clubs  

These social groups, where people gather to build and decorate their own coffins, are gaining popularity. Learn more about the movement here.

Bios Urn 

For those looking for an eco-friendly farewell, the Bios Urn turns ashes into trees. Explore more here.

Space Burial

Send your ashes to space with Celestis. Find details here.

Personalized Vinyl Records

 Your ashes can now be pressed into vinyl records with And Vinyly.

Trivia

What year did the United States enact the Funeral Rule, which requires funeral homes to provide a General Price List to consumers?

Click on the right answer, and you’ll see a puppy. Get it wrong, and you’ll see someone hurting themselves.

Answer Choices:

A) 1954
B) 1974
C) 1984

You Otter Be Proud

Here’s some good news going on in the profession.

1. Father-son teamwork helps Aiken funeral home thrive
2. Old Lick Cemetery in Roanoke cleaned, repaired with help of national expert
3. Fifth-generation funeral director Jeff Monreal helps families grieve, celebrate loved ones