I can’t even imagine being a grieving family member and learning about this.
The call came in at shortly after 11 a.m. on Wednesday: A terrible stench was coming from a pair of trucks parked outside a funeral home on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.
When the police arrived, they made a gruesome discovery. Inside the trucks — a U-Haul rental and what seemed to be a tractor-trailer — were several dozen decomposing bodies.
The “several dozen” bodies were enclosed in body bags outside the Andrew T. Cleckley Funeral Home in Brooklyn. Apparently the funeral home’s freezer, which normally preserves the bodies of the dead until they are buried or cremated, had stopped operating.
No freezer means the bodies have to go somewhere. In this case, they were piled into two trucks, where they began to decompose. It’s not clear how many of the bodies were those of victims of COVID-19, but it’s reasonable to assume that most were.
New York City’s death care system — its hospital mortuaries, cemeteries, crematories and city-run morgues — has been under extraordinary strain in recent weeks as beleaguered workers have tried to grapple with the single worst mass casualty event to hit New York since the Spanish flu pandemic of a century ago. At least 14,000 people in the city have perished from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Funeral directors, whom we can assume constitute a fairly discrete, numerically-limited class of people during normal times, are simply overwhelmed under the circumstances of this pandemic.
No one has felt the pressure more than funeral directors who have been caught in the vise between the rising tide of bodies pouring out of hospitals and nursing homes and the backlogs that make them unable to cremate or bury people quickly. Some funeral homes have had to use refrigerated trailers, and others have converted chapels into temporary morgues, using high-powered air conditioners to chill the rooms.
In this case, the owner of the funeral home (who is listed as licensed by the New York Department of Health) could not be reached by The New York Times for comment. Two summonses have been issued.
Not trying to belabor this, but imagine: Your father or mother, sister or brother, wife or husband dies, and you find out their bodies have been left out to rot in a U-Haul truck. Because there’s just too many bodies.
Politicians and the media are having a field day right now debating the “pros and cons” of “reopening” the country to “get the economy moving again.” It’s all nice, dry and “theoretical” discussion, with various people soberly quoting statistics and projections, weighing “infection rates,” and “death rates” against “voluntary distancing” measures, and there’s a good deal of magical thinking and boldfaced, even belligerent optimism thrown in for good measure.
For a lot of these people it seems to be kind of a a game, because it hasn’t affected them—yet.
But when a person, who somebody, somewhere has probably loved all their life, be it a father, mother, sister, brother, or child, has their body basically just tossed out and left to decompose, piled up with dozens of others on the street, one would think that might provide these folks—who are so gung-ho with their clever, well thought-out solutions about “reopening” the economy—with a little bit of perspective on what we’re really talking about.