‘I only ask God to help me’: Texas funeral home destroyed by death as the number of COVID in the United States approaches 500,000 | The widest image

“It is mentally draining,” Pryor, 59, who runs a small funeral home with his wife Almika, told Reuters earlier this month.

The large number of deaths from coronavirus has burdened many funeral homes in the United States. Some family businesses have handled an overwhelming load of cases, with some seeing the same number of deaths in a few months that they would normally handle in an entire year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.

“Most funeral directors know it’s a 24-hour, 365-day career, but you’re just not used to working all these days,” Nie told Reuters.

The pandemic has brought about profound changes in the way Pryor should operate. Overburdened hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly. It has been difficult to find trained personnel, coffins and protective equipment. And every day brings a plethora of phone calls from families in distress and anguish.

As the virus showed no signs of breaking out and deaths increased in the summer and fall, exhausted workers at the Pryority Funeral Experience fell ill, while others dropped out.

“People give up because they can’t mentally deal with it,” he said. “I pray to God, – just give me strength … I want to run away now, to be honest … I’m worried about my breakdown, so I ask God to help me.”

Sometimes the stories you hear at work torment you.

Like the one you were told when you answered a call from COVID-19 on a recent weekend in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston.

A young woman in her 30s had just died of complications from the virus, a time after doctors performed a caesarean section to save the lives of her twins as her condition deteriorated.

The next day, Pryor was having a hard time processing the tragedy, one of hundreds of thousands that marked a year of deep losses across the country and the world.

“I slept with him last night and hate it when you take them to bed,” he said.

Pryor said he was never as busy as during the pandemic. The deaths that the funeral home controlled in 2020 were more than twice as many as he would see in a normal year.

January was a terrible month. Even while hospitalizations in Texas fell 10% last month, from a 36% increase in December, coronavirus deaths increased 48%, according to a Reuters analysis of state and municipal data.

“I myself pass and refuse people because I can’t do much,” said Pryor.

His team of four full-time and eight part-time employees is feeling the tension, he said.

Embalmers and others who come into direct contact with bodies and are at greater risk of contagion have been difficult to find, Pryor said. And coffins are missing due to the pandemic. On a Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight of them.

The work is so exhausting, said Pryor, that there is little time left to perform the most essential personal tasks, such as cooking or spending time with her son who would soon turn 10.

While caring for those who lost loved ones in their community, Pryor’s family faced its own pain. The virus took his nephew and uncle while his wife lost her cousin and aunt to COVID-19.

Pryor grew up in rural Texas, the youngest of six children and the only of his brothers who did not attend segregated schools. His first contact with the funeral business was in the late 1970s, when he helped illiterate members of his community with their correspondence and accounts at the local funeral home on the first day of each month.

“I was involved in helping people when they needed help most,” said Pryor.

Since starting his own business in 1984, celebrating life, even in death, has always been the center of his profession, he said. But the coronavirus pandemic has turned everything “upside down”, making it even more difficult to help people during the grieving process.

In late January, Pryor and his team took care of the funeral arrangements for Gregory Blanks, a 50-year-old COVID-19 victim who ran a heating and air conditioning company in the Houston area. He was a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

In keeping with current restrictions to prevent infection, only a limited number of family and friends were able to attend the burial at San Felipe Community Cemetery, where a preacher spoke beside a table lined with baseball caps for Cowboys and other Texas teams.

Wearing a mask with her husband’s company logo, Blanks’s wife, Lila, watched solemnly as some of Pryor’s workers lowered the coffin to the floor.