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The New York Times
‘A nightmare every day’: inside a busy funeral home
LOS ANGELES – The Chapel at Continental Funeral Home was once a place where the living remembered the dead. Now benches, chairs, and furniture have been set aside to make room, and the dead far outnumber the living. One Thursday afternoon last month in Continental’s Chapel in East Los Angeles, across from a 7-Eleven, there were four bodies in cardboard boxes. And two bodies in open coffins, waiting for makeup. Sign up for The Morning New York Times newsletter And seven wrapped in white and pink sheets on wheeled stretchers. And 18 in closed coffins where the benches were. And 31 on the shelves of the racks against the walls. Mathematics numbed the heart as much as the mind – 62 bodies. Elsewhere at Continental – in the hallways beyond the chapel, in the trailers outside – there were even more. “I live a nightmare every day,” said Magda Maldonado, 58, owner of the funeral home. “It’s a crisis, a deep crisis. When someone calls me, I beg them to be patient. “Please be patient,” I said, “that’s all I ask of you. Because nothing is normal these days. Funeral homes are places America often prefers to ignore. As the coronavirus pandemic has exploded in Los Angeles in recent months, the industry has gone into disaster mode, quietly and anonymously facing massive deaths on a scale for which it was unprepared and ill-equipped. Like those in Queens and Brooklyn, New York in the spring or South Texas in the summer, funeral homes in parts of Los Angeles have become hellish symbols of the COVID-19 toll. Continental has been one of the most busy funeral homes in the country. Its location in the center of southern California’s coronavirus peak, its popularity with working-class Mexican and Mexican American families who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, its decision to expand its storage capacity – it all went down. combined to turn everyday life into day in a careful dance of controlled chaos. For more than six weeks, a journalist and photographer were allowed by Maldonado, his employees and the relatives of those who died to document the inner workings of the morgue and the grief of the funeral after the funeral after the funeral. Beverly Hills had 32 deaths. Santa Monica had 150. East Los Angeles – an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County which is one of the largest Mexican American communities in the United States – has had 388. With more than 52,000 related deaths With the virus, California has recorded most of any state but roughly on a per capita average. At Continental, the brutal reality of the death toll strikes first in the gut, then in the eyes. As you enter the chapel hall, look first to the left: four bodies under white linens on hardware-style metal shelves originally designed to hold something other than human lives. Next to these four were four more, and more in the middle, and more to the right. The 31 bodies on the shelves rested on plywood and cardboard beds, their heads on Styrofoam pillows. The shelves were so high in one corner that the finial of an ornate chandelier illuminated it from a few inches. Bodies in coffins were deployed. Bodies on stretchers were rolled up. Their uniformity was disturbed by the smallest details: a tuft of long black hair of a woman protruding from the top of her sheets, a right foot. “We don’t know how the public will see it, but it was necessary,” said Maldonado of the conversion of the chapel. “The need led us to improvise. We’re in America, so we assume we’re up for anything. But in this emergency situation that we had, we were not. The Burden of the Workers The trailer was cool and unusually empty. Eleven bodies were lined up on the right and seven on the left, all in cardboard boxes. The names were written in black marker on the lid flaps. The tallest piles were four heights, with each box separated by a strip of plywood. Victor Hernandez helped push a new one, the 19th Corps. He was one of the most recent employees of Continental Funeral Home. Hernandez, 23, was a chef at a sushi restaurant but lost his job when the state closed. Without work for months, he went to 7-Eleven in front of the funeral home one day and saw the sign Maldonado had posted on the corner: “Now Hiring!” He started a few weeks ago, earning $ 15 an hour, plus overtime. The coworker who helped him push the stretcher into the middle of the trailer, 23-year-old Daniel Murillo, was also recently hired. He worked at McDonald’s. “I’m not going to lie: the first day I had nightmares,” Hernandez said. “It makes me appreciate life a lot more now. I see my parents, my sisters – I see them differently from before. I must cherish them. Firefighters, nurses, doctors, paramedics, police – the first responders who make up the country’s coronavirus frontlines have been celebrated throughout the pandemic. But in hard-hit cities, funeral home workers have been the last invisible responders. They always did the job that no one wanted, but now they do it to the extreme. The virus exhausted them, caused some to quit, and infected them as well. They see themselves as working class emergency workers in a specialized and poorly understood field. “I feel like this job was a calling for me,” said Brianna Hernandez, 26, manager and apprentice embalmer. “Most of my friends and family say to me, ‘You are crazy’. No one wants to talk about death. It’s going to happen to any of us, anytime, anytime. Maldonado, the owner of Continental, said about 25% of employees at her funeral homes in California have tested positive for the virus, but none of them have been infected while handling bodies. Yet she has largely remained aloof from the parents and devotees of her church. “I can’t go to anyone’s house because I feel like I have the virus with me and I’m going to take it,” said Maldonado. “So for me, I come home, take a shower, and stay home.” In some ways, Continental is like any other place to work. Led Zeppelin and Guns N ‘Roses sound from the radio in the embalming room. Workers walk the halls after lunch sipping McDonald’s sodas. Murillo talks about renovating his 1967 VW Beetle. Hernandez, in an Iron Maiden knit cap, talks about producing his own music. In tight spaces, at a rushed pace, with coffins and stretchers parading, mistakes are made. One afternoon, Hernandez leaned over the shelves and jostled the dead man’s arm on the lower shelf. “Sorry, mate,” he told her. Numbers are overwhelming The calendar Maldonado keeps at his desk ran out of space during the pandemic. She had to glue extra columns at the bottom of the pages to add time slots, one of dozens of little improvisations. One day recently, she had 12 funerals in her four locations in the Los Angeles area. The next day she was 13. Maldonado and his officials estimate the total number of bodies at Continental’s East Los Angeles site almost daily at 260. Over the past 10 weeks, office phones have been inundated with hundreds. calls, so she shot on weekends. response service in an operation seven days a week. She had the tables and counters removed from the cafeteria where the grieving parents gathered; after the installation of the cooling units, the space, like the chapel, was transformed into a makeshift mortuary. The large whiteboard on an office wall was built for 22 names of those who had perished. Now there are over 150, and there are other filled billboards on other walls. Two of the names were Ernestino and Luisa Hoyos. They had been married for almost 40 years. He was 63 years old and a gardener. She was 60 years old and worked in an adult care facility for the elderly. They bought a house in nearby Fontana, large enough for the whole family to live together, including their children and grandchildren. Luisa Hoyos worked in the adult care facility with her daughter. A colleague of theirs infected Hoyos and his daughter, family members said, and they brought the virus back to their home in 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 had 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 really are no words to describe what we’re going through,” said the couple’s daughter, Anayeli Hoyos, 38. “I know COVID is going to go away, but we are scarred. We are marked for the rest of our lives. Those who remain dead were quick in East Los Angeles, but mourning awaits. The delays – for the body to be collected from the hospital, for an open date for a funeral – last for weeks. The pent-up grief spreads daily in the parking lot that has become Continental’s new outdoor chapel. The speed of traffic passes on Beverly Boulevard, drowning some praise. Pedestrians and postmen sneak behind the folding chairs at mid-ceremony. Mariachis sing Mexican ballads as loved ones decompose next to traffic cones. Amada Perez Rodriguez, 79, mother of two and grandmother of seven, died of the coronavirus on January 6. His funeral took place on February 10. in the parking lot after his funeral. “On her last breath, she cared more about us than her own health. I remember telling her, “How are you mom? And she said, ‘No, how are the kids? How is it going? Vicenta Bahena, 54, contracted the virus at a laundromat. Everyone in his house was infected, including his longtime partner Serafin Salgado, 47, a dump truck driver. All have recovered, except Bahena, who was born in Iguala, Mexico, and raised three sons. She died on January 26 at a hospital in the town of Inglewood. Salgado initially believed Bahena’s body would be taken to the funeral home the day after her death in hospital. But he called Continental and was told it would take weeks. “They told me they had so much body that they couldn’t help me yet,” Salgado said. Bahena finally arrived at Continental more than two weeks after her death. “I want to rest and stop thinking that she’s out in the cold while I’m warm at home,” Salgado said. He and Bahena had been together for three decades but never legally married. They had planned to get married this year. Last week at Continental, in a hallway marked by so many dead, near 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 originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
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