Nearly one month has passed since Iris Canada died, but she still has no resting place. Her body lies in the cold morgue at UCSF Medical Center, where the 100-year-old woman died March 25. It’s a macabre coda to the eviction drama that has made headlines around the country, to the shame of San Francisco.

Canada died after a lengthy eviction battle with the landlords of the Fillmore district apartment that had been her home for a half century. The landlords had given her lifetime rights to the apartment — so long as she, and only she, actually permanently lived there. But when they determined she was not living in the apartment — a finding upheld by a judge — they evicted her, with the court’s approval.

The judge’s ruling notwithstanding, Canada’s grandniece, Iris Merriouns, insists that Canada was still living in the apartment, even as the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department posted the eviction notice Feb. 10. Twelve days later, a moving company hired and paid for by the landlords packed up Canada’s belongings of a lifetime, 100 cartons in all, and put them into storage.

Emails between the two sides and their attorneys show that the landlords took the step after trying, repeatedly, to work out an arrangement for the family to enter the apartment to retrieve belongings and bring in movers to take everything.

Friends and relatives of Canada — who say they were focused at the time on her declining health — rushed to the apartment Feb. 22 when they heard that it was being cleaned out by the movers the landlords had hired. After some intense, on-site discussion involving Andrew Zacks, the landlords’ attorney, and police officers who had been summoned, Merriouns was allowed to enter the apartment to bring out critical items like the elderly woman’s wheelchair, according to Tommi Avicolli Mecca of the Housing Rights Committee, a tenants rights activist who was there at the time.

But overlooked in the moving shuffle was Canada’s prepaid funeral insurance contract, which Merriouns believes was stuffed along with other papers and documents into one of the packing cartons.

These cartons are now stacked at Pedro’s Moving & Storage facility in Bayview-Hunters Point. And without the funeral insurance papers, the family says it can’t pay for the mortal remains of Iris Canada to be interred in the Colma cemetery plot that she selected for herself. They say they can’t turn to the company that issued the policy because they don’t know who the provider was.

Pedro’s charges daily storage fees of $67. Canada’s family didn’t retrieve the belongings immediately because, Merriouns says, they were overwhelmingly concerned with the elderly woman’s deteriorating health. So the family now faces a bill of $4,000 to gain possession of Canada’s belongings.

And Canada’s body remains in limbo.

Merriouns, who works as a special assistant to Oakland City Council President Larry Reid, says the landlords — Peter Owens; his wife, Carolyn Radisch; and brother Stephen Owens — rushed the evacuation of the apartment, putting the family in a difficult financial position. “I can’t pay $4,000 or more just to see what’s inside those cartons,” said Merriouns. “The family shouldn’t be forced to pay for this.”

The landlords, in turn, said the family ignored their repeated requests to clear out the apartment themselves.

The landlords paid the $15,000 moving fee and say their financial obligations end there. On Feb. 22, Mark Chernev, an attorney in Zacks’ firm, notified Dennis Zaragoza, the lawyer for Canada’s family, that her belongings were at Pedro’s and “will be sold at public sale following procedures set forth in California Civil Code” if the family did not retrieve them by Feb. 27. But Zaragoza filed a court motion to block the sale, and the attorneys for both sides then agreed there would be no sale. Later, Peter Owens told me in an email, “There was never any intent to auction her belongings.”

Meanwhile, Zaragoza said he has been negotiating with Mayor Ed Lee’s office to see if the city could help defray the storage costs, but those talks have stalled.

The Iris Canada story has its own peculiar complications, and certainly its own uniquely morbid twist. But it’s not just the tale of a 100-year-old woman who could find no peaceful resting place, neither late in her life nor even in death. It’s part of a broader ghoulish tale of life and death in the San Francisco real estate market.

This was driven home for me when I spoke with Pedro Hermosillo, owner of the moving and storage company that now holds the contents of Canada’s life. He made clear he is a businessman who expects to be paid for his services. But he’s not without a heart. Hermosillo said he would cut the storage bill in half for Canada’s relatives, to $2,000, if they reclaim all of Canada’s possessions.

“Believe me, I feel for the family,” he told me. “I’m not being greedy.”

It turns out that Hermosillo’s own family has been hit by the eviction crisis. His elderly mother and father were recently evicted from their San Francisco apartment and were forced to move in with his sister in Oakland.

“They had to go to court — and the judge ended up ruling for the landlord, and he even wanted my mother and father to pay for the landlord’s legal fees,” Hermosillo said. “They’re old people — over 65. So I understand what Iris was going through.”

Still, as a businessman, he stands by his policy of not allowing people to pick through containers without paying the fees. That’s why he won’t let Merriouns look for the funeral insurance papers.

Evictions of the elderly, the poor and the vulnerable are happening all over the city, Hermosillo told me. He’s seen it with his own eyes. He’s been involved on both sides of the human tragedy.

“I’ve seen people who’ve been living in their homes for 30 years or more. They find themselves on the street. They’re crying. Old men and women. They’ll never live in San Francisco again. They end up moving to Sacramento or somewhere else. It’s hard.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist David Talbot appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Email: dtalbot@sfchronicle.com