Spanish mortuaries endure the daily death march

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) – When Marina Gómez and her mortuary colleague enter a room in a nursing home to remove the body of a COVID-19 victim, they are working methodically and in silence.

They disinfect the mouth, nose and eyes to reduce the risk of contamination. They wrap the body in the sheets. Two white body bags are used, one inside the other, and the zippers are closed in the opposite direction: the first bag is sealed head to tail; the second, head to head.

The only noise in the room is the whisper of the zippers, sealing the dead for the last time.

Gómez and his colleagues work for Mémora, the leading provider of funeral services in Barcelona with homes throughout Spain and Portugal. They are part of a group of essential workers. Like nurses and doctors, they saw and touched the death march of the virus that has already killed an estimated 1.4 million people worldwide.

Upon arrival at a nursing home or rehabilitation center, Gómez and his partner Manel Rivera encourage caregivers to move a surviving roommate from the room while they retrieve the body.

Many times, however, only a white curtain separates the living from the dead, and this harsh reality and lack of decency bothers Gómez.

“The simple fact of going to look for a body and to see that there is another person, alive, next to them (in the room), it is what attracts me the most”, has t she told The Associated Press.

In the first months of last spring’s pandemic, Gómez said their requests to move a surviving patient out of the room were more often honored. A kind of war atmosphere had brought people together in solidarity in the midst of misery.

Now, however, Gómez has said that many Spaniards appear to be numb by the resurgence of the virus. after a summer reprieve which led the authorities to claim that the worst was over. Today, the country has more than 1.5 million cases and has recorded more than 43,000 deaths.

Some emotional detachment is needed to continue working, admits Rivera, 44.

“Once I put the person in the shroud and closed the zipper, I don’t wonder if they have blonde, red or brown hair,” he says.

Any dwelling on the dead means “you don’t stay long in this job,” Rivera said.

After successfully reducing the daily death toll from over 900 in March to single digits in July, Spain has seen a steady increase which has brought the death toll to over 200 per day this month . With this relapse, body collectors began to tour hospitals, homes and care facilities again.

“We should have learned something,” Gómez said. “But once we were allowed to do what we wanted, we went back to our natural state. We have no memory.

Gómez, 28, was hired to replace another worker on sick leave in April, as Spain reeling from the worst of the virus. Thrown into nonstop races to salvage the dead, she had to learn on the fly how to do this difficult job safely.

Before, if someone died of an infectious disease, they wore gloves, a mask and an apron. When the virus hit Spain in March, they quickly learned how to put on personal protective suits and two pairs of gloves, and how to remove everything properly when done so as not to get infected.

So far, they have remained healthy.

When the death toll skyrocketed in March and April, Rivera decided to self-isolate for six weeks, seeing only her 5-year-old son on video.

“It was the feeling that you wanted to do everything as quickly as possible, reduce contact as much as you could, but at the same time you couldn’t go wrong,” Rivera said of those days. “We were risking our lives.”

Román Ibáñez, 38, has been transporting bodies for 14 years. He remembers the darkest weeks of this year, when the business went from 50 corpses a day to almost 200.

“It was completely crazy. You got to the point where you didn’t know what you were doing. You never took your costume off. It was chaotic, ”he said.

The most painful moment for Ibáñez was the night they responded to a nursing home.

“A young woman opened the door crying. Half the staff were sick, the night shift person had left a corpse where it was. She was trying to get someone else to come to work, but there was no one there. Half of the inhabitants had died. From our entry until our departure, she has not stopped crying, ”he said.

Picking up bodies is not a highly skilled workforce, and many mortuary workers have worked hard in factories, construction sites, and deliveries before. But it takes courage – a combination of empathy and respect, balanced with pride in doing what needs to be done.

Workers say they love their work because it gives them purpose and satisfaction.

“It’s really hard work, but it has its rewards,” said Jonathan Ciudad, Ibáñez partner. “With a sense of humanity and solidarity, you get by. You really see that life is for living.

—-

Associated Press writer Joseph Wilson contributed to this report.

___

Follow AP’s coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak