As we commemorate the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the novel coronavirus a pandemic, this is the third column of a six-part MSNBC Daily series that reflects on the million American lives lost, the political polarization and the declining trust in public health measures that followed the virus’ spread and assesses the country’s preparedness for the next pandemic.
Though the Covid pandemic wasn’t officially declared until March 11, 2020, in mid-February, one of our funeral directors at Professional Funeral Services in New Orleans had symptoms of a cold that were so severe that she was forced to seek care at a local emergency room. She was told that she had a respiratory infection of unknown origin. We came to believe that she had Covid and that her getting sick was a precursor to one of the most emotionally trying times I’ve experienced in my 38 years as a mortician.
Her getting sick was a precursor to one of the most emotionally trying times I’ve experienced in my 38 years as a mortician.
In addition to that funeral director’s mystery illness, there was also another sign that something strange, something abnormal, was happening: The phone kept ringing.
Understand, our funeral home had typically served 35-40 families a month, but that February 2020, that number rose to 51, an increase of around 30%. At the time, we just chalked it up as an unusually busy month. We had no idea how much worse it was going to get.
And almost all of February’s numbers came before New Orleans — which hosted Mardi Gras on Feb. 25 that year — knew Covid was present and certainly before the city would make headlines as the place that, at least for a while, had the highest Covid death rate in the United States.
In March 2020, we served 74 grieving families, about twice as many as a normal month. That April we served double the number of families we’d seen in March. We reached a record then that still stands for our funeral home: 153 families.
It was absolutely overwhelming, operationally and emotionally. Our staff worked 18- to 20-hour days for weeks on end. And even when the initial spike dropped, until the latter part of 2023 we still averaged 60 to 70 cases per month.
How bad was April 2020? That’s the month our funeral home prepared five couples for burial. Then there were the three sisters. Sister one died one week. Sister two the next week. Sister three the week after that. Hospitals kept calling us, “Can you come get the body? Because we have no place to put them in the cooler.”
My funeral home has two locations: one in New Orleans and one in Port Allen, Louisiana, which is across the river from Baton Rouge, and we had to use every inch of space we had in both locations to store the extra bodies, rooms we wouldn’t ordinarily use. We used dressing rooms. We used hallways. We used the chapel. We took caskets off the racks and stood them up on their ends so we could use those racks to make room for the bodies entrusted to us.
As political pundits debated the severity of the situation, we were on the front lines, witnessing firsthand the devastation wrought by the virus. Families were being torn apart, and we faced the dual challenge of navigating misinformation and working around the restrictions imposed by city and state officials to limit public gatherings to ensure public safety.
And on top of all that, families were telling us that the bodies we presented to them didn’t look like their loved ones. And they were right. We were embalming them the way we always had, but we weren’t getting the same results. Something about what Covid had done to their bodies was leaving their bodies swollen with fluid, and their features were distorted. And we were having to try to develop our techniques to deal with it.
Understand, my tenure as a mortician in New Orleans includes time periods when the city was listed as the murder capital of the country, and it includes the devastation that followed Hurricane Katrina and the levees falling apart. But nothing I saw then prepared me or the rest of our staff for what we saw in 2020. It’s something I’ve never seen in my life and something I hope to never see again.
It’s something I’ve never seen in my life and something I hope to never see again.
The pandemic’s toll was not just numerical; it was profoundly human. We witnessed the grief and despair of families who lost loved ones, often without the chance to say goodbye in person. The restrictions on gatherings meant that traditional funerals were replaced with smaller, more intimate services, often streamed online to allow friends and family to participate from a distance. People didn’t get to hug their family members when they needed hugs the most. They didn’t get to send them off with a second-line band, as is the tradition in New Orleans.
I don’t have to wonder what the families who sought our services were going through — what it was like not being able to sit with your loved ones at the hospital and then not being able to have a proper funeral for them — because in the summer of 2020, I lost my grandmother to Covid. She was 90 years old. She had worked tirelessly at her church since she was 15 but, when she died, we weren’t even able to memorialize her there the way we felt she deserved.
It only compounded the grief.
