The New York Times
‘A nightmare every day’: inside an overloaded funeral home
LOS ANGELES – The chapel of the Continental Funerary House was once a place where the living remembered the dead. Now the benches, chairs and furniture have been put aside to make room, and the dead far outnumber the living. On a Thursday afternoon last month at Continental’s chapel in East Los Angeles, in front of a 7-Eleven, there were four bodies in cardboard boxes. And two bodies in open coffins, awaiting makeup. Subscribe to the New York Times newsletter The Morning And seven wrapped in white and pink sheets on stretchers. And 18 in closed coffins where the banks used to be. And 31 on the rack racks against the walls. Mathematics numbed the heart as much as the mind – 62 bodies. Elsewhere on Continental – in the corridors beyond the chapel, in the trailers outside – there was even more. “I live a nightmare every day,” said Magda Maldonado, 58, owner of the funeral home. “It is a crisis, a deep crisis. When someone calls me, I beg for patience. ‘Please be patient,’ I say, ‘that is all I am asking of you.’ Because nothing is normal nowadays. ”Funeral homes are places that America generally prefers to ignore. With the rise of the coronavirus pandemic in Los Angeles in recent months, the industry has gone into disaster mode, quietly and anonymously dealing with mass deaths on a scale for which it was unprepared and ill-equipped. Like those in Queens and Brooklyn, New York, in the spring or in southern Texas in the summer, funeral homes in parts of Los Angeles have become hellish symbols of the COVID-19 tribute. Continental has been one of the most overburdened funeral homes in the country. Its location at the center of Southern California’s coronavirus peak, its popularity with Mexican and Mexican-American working class families that were disproportionately affected by COVID-19, its decision to expand its storage capacity – all combined to turn the day day-to-day in a careful dance of controlled chaos. For more than six weeks, a reporter and photographer were authorized by Maldonado, his staff and the relatives of those who died to document the inner workings of the morgue and the funeral headache after funeral after funeral. Beverly Hills had 32 deaths. Santa Monica had 150. East Los Angeles – an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County that is one of the largest Mexican-American communities in the United States – had 388. With more than 52,000 virus-related deaths, California recorded the largest part of any state, but about the average per capita. At Continental, the brutal reality of the death toll hits the stomach first and then the eyes. At the entrance to the chapel lobby, look first to the left: four bodies under white sheets on metal shelves in the style of a hardware store originally designed to contain something other than human lives. Next to these four were another four, and more in the middle and more to the right. The 31 bodies on the shelves rested on plywood and cardboard plates, their heads on Styrofoam cushions. The shelves were so high in one corner that the trim of an ornate chandelier exceeded it by inches. Coffin bodies were unrolled. Bodies on stretchers were rolled up. Its uniformity was interrupted by the smallest details: a tuft of a woman’s long black hair falling from the top of the sheets, a right foot. “We don’t know how the public will see it, but it was necessary,” said Maldonado of the chapel’s conversion. “The need led us to improvise. We are in America, so we assume that we are prepared for everything. But in this emergency that we had, we were not. ”The workers’ burden The trailer was cool and exceptionally empty. Eleven bodies were aligned to the right and seven to the left, all in cardboard boxes. The names were written in black marker on the eyelid flaps. The tallest stacks had four, each box separated by a strip of plywood. Victor Hernandez helped to push a new one, the 19th body. He was one of the newest employees at the Continental Funerary House. Hernandez, 23, was a chef at a sushi restaurant, but lost his job during the state shutdown. Without work for months, he went to 7-Eleven in front of the funeral home one day and saw the sign that Maldonado had posted on the corner: “Now hiring!” He started a few weeks ago, earning $ 15 an hour, plus overtime. The co-worker who helped him push the stretcher in the middle of the trailer, Daniel Murillo, 23, was also hired recently. He used to work at McDonald’s. “I’m not going to lie: on the first day I had nightmares,” said Hernandez. “It makes me appreciate life a lot more now. I see my parents, my sisters – I see them differently than before. I have to take care of them. ”Firefighters, nurses, doctors, paramedics, police – the first respondents who make up the front lines of the country’s coronavirus were celebrated during the pandemic. But in the hard-hit cities, funeral homes have been the last invisible answers. They always did the job that nobody wants, but now they do it to the extreme. The virus depleted them, pushed some to stop and infected them too. They see themselves as working-class emergency workers in a specialized and poorly understood field. “I feel that this job was a vocation for me,” said Brianna Hernandez, 26, manager and apprentice embalmer. “Most of my friends and family say, ‘You are crazy.’ Nobody wants to talk about death. It will happen to any of us, anytime, anytime. ”Maldonado, the owner of Continental, said that about 25% of employees at their funeral homes in California tested positive for the virus, but none of them were infected by handling bodies. Even so, she has stayed away from relatives and fellow worshipers in her church. “I can’t go to anyone’s house because I feel like I have the virus and I’m going to take it,” said Maldonado. “So, for me, I go home, take a shower and stay home.” In a way, Continental is a workplace like any other. Led Zeppelin and Guns N ‘Roses shout on the radio in the embalming room. Workers walk down the aisles after lunch, drinking McDonald’s sodas. Murillo talks about the refurbishment of his 1967 VW Beetle. Hernandez, in a knitted Iron Maiden cap, talks about producing his own music. In cramped places, at a hurried pace, with coffins and stretchers passing, mistakes are made. One afternoon Hernandez bent over the shelves and pushed the dead man’s arm on the bottom shelf. “Sorry, friend,” he told him. The numbers are overwhelming The calendar that Maldonado keeps on his desk has run out of space with the pandemic. She had to paste extra columns at the bottom of the pages to add time intervals, one of dozens of small improvisations. One day recently, she had 12 funerals at her four locations in the Los Angeles area. The next day, she was 13. Maldonado and her managers estimate the total number of bodies on Continental’s website in East Los Angeles most days at around 260. In the past 10 weeks, office phones have been flooded with hundreds of calls , then she changed the weekend attendance into an operation seven days a week. She removed the tables and counters from the cafeteria where bereaved relatives used to gather; after the installation of the cooling units, the space, like the chapel, was transformed into an improvised morgue. The large whiteboard on the wall of an office was built for 22 names of people who died. Now it has more than 150, and there are other bulletin boards on other walls. Two of the names were Ernestino and Luisa Hoyos. They had been married for almost 40 years. He was 63 and a gardener. She was 60 years old and worked in an institution for elderly adults. They bought a house near Fontana large enough for the whole family to live together, including their children and grandchildren. Luisa Hoyos worked at an adult institution with her daughter. One of his co-workers infected Hoyos and his daughter, family members said, and they brought the virus home to Fontana. Hoyos and her husband were taken to the same hospital and eventually placed in the same room. She died first, on January 13; he died on January 16. Just as they shared a hospital room, the Hoyoses shared a funeral. At Continental, double funerals – for husbands and wives, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters – have become commonplace. “There are really no words to describe what we are going through,” said the couple’s daughter, Anayeli Hoyos, 38. “I know that COVID is leaving, but we are marked. We are marked for the rest of our lives. ”Those who remain Death was swift in eastern Los Angeles, but mourning awaits. The delays – for the body to be picked up at a hospital, for the date open for a funeral – last for weeks. The pent-up pain spreads daily in the parking lot that has become Continental’s new outdoor chapel. Traffic accelerates on Beverly Boulevard, drowning out some praise. Pedestrians and postal workers crossed chairs behind folding chairs in the middle of the ceremony. Mariachi perform Mexican ballads while relatives crumble next to traffic cones. Amada Perez Rodriguez, 79, mother of two and grandmother of seven, died of coronavirus on January 6. His funeral was on February 10. “It is very frustrating, distressing,” said his son, Moises Perez, 45, as he stood up in the parking lot after his funeral. “In her last breath, she was more concerned about us than her own health. I remember saying to her, ‘How are you, mom?’ And she said, ‘No, how are the children? How are you? ‘”Vicenta Bahena, 54, contracted the virus in a laundry. Everyone in his home was infected, including his longtime partner, Serafin Salgado, 47, a dump truck driver. Everyone recovered, except Bahena, who was born in Iguala, Mexico, and raised three children. She died on January 26 in a hospital in the city of Inglewood. Salgado initially thought that Bahena’s body would be taken to the funeral home the day after his death in the hospital. But he called Continental and was told it would take weeks. “I was told that they have so many bodies that they couldn’t help yet,” said Salgado. Bahena finally arrived at Continental more than two weeks after his death. “I want to rest and stop thinking that she is cold while I am warm at home,” said Salgado. He and Bahena had been together for three decades, but never legally married. They planned to get married this year. Last week at Continental, in a hallway marked by so many deaths, next to a row of empty vertical coffins, there was a glimpse of life on a hanger. It was Bahena’s wedding dress, wrapped in plastic, awaiting her funeral. This article was originally published in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company