Sacramento funeral service students going to New York to help

Ally Pawelczyk knew she had to help.

Two weeks ago, the National Funeral Directors Association put out a call for volunteers — funeral home directors, apprentices, students — to send out to parts of the country hit worse by the widening coronavirus pandemic. Pawelczyk, studying in her first year at American River College’s Funeral Service Education program, signed up the same day.

She, along with her classmate Benjamin Cardinelli, will fly next week to New York, where more than 10,000 people have been killed by COVID-19, the disease caused by the highly contagious virus. The pair will spend two weeks helping funeral homes flooded by the surge in deaths there.

Funeral homes are scrambling to find enough people to shuttle bodies from hospitals. Crematoriums and cemeteries are backed up with appointments. Some funeral directors are having to use secondary chapel rooms to find space. Some places are seeing double, even triple the number of deaths they’d normally see in the course of a week.

“Staff is stretched so thin they themselves are physically exhausted and are finding it difficult to continue their work,” said Jessica Koth, a spokeswoman with the National Funeral Directors Association

That means more waiting and agonizing for family members and loved ones, and delays in ensuring people who have died are cared for with respect and dignity, Pawelczyk said.

Nearly 500 volunteers have already been assigned by the association to a

COVID-19 hotspot in the country for deployment: New York, New Jersey, Michigan, North Carolina. Hundreds more have signed up. Pawelczyk said she’ll be tasked with tagging people, transporting individuals, and assisting with embalmings and cremations.

And the association is still taking more volunteers. The latest reports from Massachusetts about flareups in the state have got local officials there starting to mobilize.

There have been similar calls to action for people in the business of handling the dead. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, Koth said, and after Hurricane Katrina,

when funeral homes across the Gulf Coast were paralyzed.

The scope now is different though. It’s not just one city or region affected in the country, she said. Funeral homes and crematoriums scattered through the nation struggling. And there people are still dying for other reasons. They all need to be taken care of.

Pawelczyk said she’s a little nervous to head into what feels like the eye of the storm. She’s been told she’ll be given personal protective equipment. But there’s still many things researchers don’t know about the virus, she said. Still, she’s committed. “This is what I’m meant to do,” she said. “The opportunity to get out there and help during a time like this is overpowering my nervousness.”

After volunteering for two weeks, Pawelczyk and Cardinelli will have to quarantine there for another two weeks.

Then, participants are given the option to volunteer again — and Pawelczyk said, without hesitation, that she would.