No priest, no friends and no physical contact
The flag at the entrance to Green-wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is flying at half-mast. It is not the first time in its 180-year history that the Stars and Stripes has been lowered, but it has never been for this long.
“It has been seven weeks and we don’t know when it will feel right to raise it again,” said Eric Barna, the cemetery’s vice-president of operations. “I just don’t see it happening in the near future.”
As the largest of four crematoriums serving New York City – the centre of the coronavirus outbreak in America – few places have been hit harder than Green-wood. The city has suffered more than 16,400 deaths in two months, tolls not recorded since the last deadly pandemic of 1918. Meanwhile, the US as a whole is fast approaching the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths, the most of any country.
At the height of the city’s outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes – more than 800 per day, or four times the city’s normal death rate.
While the numbers have begun to slow, funeral homes and crematoriums are overflowing as they struggle to work through the enormous backlog.
Hearses line up at Green-wood’s gothic archway for an afternoon of back-to-back services. Mourners queue behind in their cars. Funerals in the time of corona are a procedural affair.
At one end of the cemetery, Daniel Rodriquez, 52, is attending his second one of the day. After a short ceremony for his younger brother, Junior, he walks over the hill to a plot where they are scattering the ashes of his Aunt Sandra.
A small number of relatives – wearing rubber gloves, face masks and goggles – pray as Daniel’s Uncle Hector arranges his late wife’s favourite flowers on the parched earth.
No priest, no friends and no physical contact. They dare not touch, seeing how deadly the virus has proved for the Rodriquez family. The service is over in less than 10 minutes.
“They passed away within hours of each other three weeks earlier,” Mr Rodriquez told The Daily Telegraph. “Junior had asthma and diabetes, so we knew when he started coughing that it wasn’t going to be good. By the end, he couldn’t even swallow.
“Our people have been hit bad,” he said, referring to the Hispanic community. “Everyone knows someone who has died. It’s a miracle that my dad isn’t in here now too. He’s 87, caught the virus in a nursing home and fell into a coma. Now he’s up talking again.”
He said he would have preferred for his relatives to have been buried, as is customary in the family, but had figured cremation would be both cheaper and safer in the current climate.
Many more families are now opting for cremations in the hopes of holding memorials for loved ones later, when restrictions on funeral gatherings are lifted, Mr Barna said.
Green-wood has been overwhelmed with requests. Precovid, they would carry out around 65 cremations a week. Now they are exceeding 150. “And that’s with a cap,” he said. “Without it we’d probably be doing 300-400, based on the demand.”
Meanwhile, they used to hold 20 burials a week, now they are doing as many as 45.
“Before corona, you could call us in the morning and have a service that afternoon,” Mr Barna said. “It was like a switch went, on March 22. Overnight, our phones started ringing off the hook.”
They quickly booked out five weeks in advance, and more than 600 appointments were scheduled.
“The only thing that has come close to this for Green-wood was the Spanish Flu of 1918, which obviously none of us here remember,” he said. “We braced for the worst after 9/11. We were told to prepare for hundreds of burials, but actually that never happened because of the trouble they had locating remains.” The gravediggers and crematory operators are working 16-hour days, seven days a week to keep on top of the load, which does not yet appear to be easing.
City authorities even suspended air quality rules to allow crematories to burn round the clock. Black smoke billowed from Green-wood’s stacks on a recent Thursday.
Crematory operators like Ali Meawad sometimes sleep on site, not seeing the point in making the long journey home only to have to return a few hours later. Mr Meawad says the work is “crushing” and “exhausting”. He now finds himself hoping for cardboard coffins, which burn much quicker than lacquered wooden ones – saving much-needed time.
He wears a hazmat suit, goggles and gloves for his work. He sanitises everything after each casket is sent to the furnace. He cannot afford to take any risks with an asthmatic ninemonth-old daughter at home.
Strict Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act laws in the US, which protects patients’ privacy, mean the crematorium is not officially allowed to be told which patients died of coronavirus.
“The funeral directors come in with the caskets and just say ‘It’s not in the papers, but just be careful with these ones’ and they point to suspected Covid deaths on the list,” said Mr Barna. “It’s a really crazy system.”
The limited space in cemeteries has created a knock-on problem for funeral homes, some of which have resorted to storing body bags in viewing rooms and chapels.
Last month, rental trucks filled with as many as 100 decomposing bodies were discovered outside a funeral home in Brooklyn. Police were alerted by neighbours who reported an odour.
The owner, Andrew Cleckley, said he had nowhere else to put them, simply telling officers: “I ran out of space.”
The city has been storing bodies in more than 30 refrigerated trucks in a parking lot in the borough’s Sunset Park neighbourhood. For a while, it was temporarily burying the dead on Hart Island in the Bronx, which has a long history of taking in unclaimed bodies. They stopped after the images of mass graves caused an outcry.
For the families of the victims, the overloaded system has turned the already painful act of mourning into a kind of torture. Some feel as though their deaths are treated as statistics.
“It’s been all about the numbers,” says Alexa Aviles, a community organiser standing next to a newly erected noticeboard outside the cemetery. “There has been an anger here that these people haven’t been named, their pictures not shown – particularly those of us in the black and brown community.”
Under the words “Naming the Lost” in English, Spanish, Arabic, Urdu and Mandarin, someone has tacked a photograph of a family-of-three who died within days of each other.
There is another picture of an evidently much-loved local shop owner. Next to it, a poem written by a student for her late teacher.
“This is a way for us to mourn collectively,” says Ms Aviles, who came up for the idea after losing four of her own family members. “That is something that the virus had taken away.”
‘At the height of the city’s outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes – more than 800 per day’
‘Overnight, our phones started ringing off the hook’