JOhanna Matamoros’s father and mother died a month apart in December and January. But with Los Angeles funeral homes on the brink due to the Covid-19 catastrophe, she may have to wait two to three months to bury them.
“I am not able to suffer. It is so painful, ”she told the Guardian.
Matamoros’ father, 56, Asmel, died from Covid in December in El Salvador, where he traveled to say goodbye to his dying mother. Her mother, Jeannethe, was heartbroken by the loss of her 32-year-old husband, and died of heart failure a month later. “She just sat there and cried. They just couldn’t be separated from each other. “
However, it can take months before the couple can be buried together. Even though Asmel had already booked a place in the North Hollywood cemetery for him and his wife, Matamoros may not be able to get a service date until April. She still hopes that the funeral home will give her a first date and that her father’s ashes will come from El Salvador.
The collapse of the funeral industry is a particularly bleak consequence of the coronavirus disaster in Los Angeles, one of Covid’s worst access points in America. With an average of one death every six minutes and more than 200 deaths per day, all parts of the system are overloaded with bodies, including funeral homes, morgues, cemeteries, crematoriums, the coroner’s office, the public health department and morgues. hospitals.
Many bereaved families spend hours calling funeral homes, only to learn that the morgues will be full in the near future. Those who manage to find a capable morgue or enter the waiting list are told to wait more than a month for a service. And with the phones ringing nonstop, some families say they can’t even find out where the bodies of their loved ones are.
The crisis has become so dire this week, with an accumulation of more than 2,700 bodies stored in hospitals and the coroner’s office, that local air quality regulators have announced that the county would lift limits on the number of cremations allowed in the region .
For many funeral directors, the decline of families is unprecedented. “We have been in the market for 75 years and have never had to refuse families,” said Nichol Montague, the funeral director at the South Los Angeles morgue, located in one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in the region.
“Families are calling me daily, saying, can you just put me on the waiting list when you have space? And there is nothing we can do, it is so horrible. “
In a sign of how dire the situation has become, Montague said he recently received a call from a woman whose grandmother had died at home and was having trouble finding someone to pick up the body. “These families just want a closure. That hurts.”
Hugo Sanchez Laurel, president of Optima Funeral Home in southern Los Angeles, said he was temporarily closing the doors on new families until he could resolve his current cases. During the end of the holiday season, he rejected about 25 families a day, he said. Now, he is advising troubled families to try to call morgues outside LA. He doesn’t know what else to do.
“We always hear about mass accidents, but nothing like that,” said Laurel, who buried mother and son this week. The latest increase was similar to a mass casualty event every day, he said, and the industry was not equipped to respond. As a mainly Latin funeral home, he also needs to send bodies out of the country, which became even more difficult during the pandemic.
The National Guard was recently dispatched to LA to assist in the temporary storage of corpses, but some funeral directors have asked the county to provide further assistance, noting that the public health department is maintaining normal business hours, which can delay permits and create an additional bottleneck. Some are struggling to get overworked doctors to sign death certificates, which also exacerbates the accumulation.
When the mortuaries close, the bodies pile up in hospitals. Martin Luther King Jr Community Hospital in southern Los Angeles recently had to buy a refrigerated truck after the local morgue reached its maximum capacity, said Jonathan Westall, vice president of auxiliary services. When the truck, which had space for about 20 people, filled, he added shelves to fold the capacity. And when the shelves were not enough, he had to buy a second truck.
Everything could get worse soon, with Joe Biden warning on his second day in office that another 100,000 Americans could die in the next month, and that the Trump administration had no vaccine distribution plan.
The dying wait: ‘Pain over pain’
Elvira Marquez, a 50-year-old Angeleno whose father Manuel died on January 6, said the process of burying her father was a nightmare. Manuel asked to be buried in the Rose Hills Memorial Park and in the morgue next to his wife, but Marquez found it impossible to contact anyone in the cemetery.
She said she waited more than six hours in the waiting, and that when she finally managed to speak, a representative said that the morgue would call back when it had the capacity to pick up Manuel’s body, and that it probably wouldn’t be able to transport it until long ago. several bodies that needed transport from the hospital where he died.
She spent the next two weeks without updates, she said, and only found out 10 days after the fact that Rose Hills had indeed picked up her father. But the cemetery listed the wrong date of death on its website obituary, making her worry that Rose Hills might have mixed up corpses, especially since she hadn’t laid eyes on her father, a 77-year-old welder.
She was eventually informed that she would have a date on March 2 to make preparations, but she has no idea how long it will take to schedule the funeral after that.
“Do they have the right person? We don’t know, ”said Marquez, who last saw his father when she said goodbye at Zoom and is now raising money at GoFundMe to cover the costs of the funeral. “Having to go through this with the morgue to find out if it’s my father is indescribable. It’s surreal … The cemetery is literally flooded with so many families having to endure this pain again. “
A Rose Hills spokesman acknowledged that services were delayed, but declined to comment on Marquez’s report, saying that “all the deceased are served with the care and compassion they deserve during this unprecedented time”.
Juliana Jimenez Sesma, 41, had to figure out how to bury her parents after they died 11 days apart in December in southern Los Angeles. With funeral homes overrun and the holidays postponing even more paperwork, it took her three weeks to perform a ceremony for her mother, which she performed outdoors, in the parking lot of a church.
“It’s just pain about pain to have to wait. You can’t have a little more peace until you know that their bodies are resting, ”she said.
Sesma had the opportunity to see her mother’s body in the hospital after her death, but she had to wear a mask, gloves and gowns. “I can’t even describe the feeling of seeing your mother’s body, but feeling unable to hug or kiss her. It is just terrible. “She was grateful to be in the same room as her mother, even though they couldn’t hug each other:” She will always live with me in my heart, so I wasn’t really saying goodbye to her. “
Most families don’t have that chance. Candy Boyd, owner of the Boyd funeral home, said it was especially painful for families who had not physically seen their loved ones for weeks or months before his death, as hospitals do not allow visits. Delaying this further is agonizing, said Boyd, who recently held a funeral for a mother of nine. “They are trying to pick up the pieces and move on to the next chapter. It is simply heartbreaking. “
Johanna, who is hoping to bury her parents Asmel and Jeannethe, recently tested positive for Covid, which means that she couldn’t even be with her mother in her final days. Her parents were loved in the community – devout Christians, her father known as a karaoke master, her mother an expert in floral arrangements – and several pastors volunteered to provide services, Johanna said. But as the funeral homes are protected, the family is trapped in limbo. She is also trying to raise funds to cover the burial costs.
“I just want a place for me to go and mourn my parents and bring them flowers. That’s all I want, ”she said. “How long will we have to wait?”