Time magazine reporter W.J. Hennigan embedded with workers responsible for caring for the bodies of some 20,000 New Yorkers who have died from COVID-19. 'It's a haunting thing,' he says.
If it wasn't handled this way and if they weren't able to expand all their operations, bodies would have to be buried in a mass grave. I mean, that's just the reality. And people within the death care system told me that ... we were very close to going off the rails here.Burials On New York Island Are Not New, But Are Increasing During Pandemic
In the early days of the pandemic they were ... so inundated with corpses that they were just incapable of holding them all. And this is before these emergency disaster morgues were established. There are now four of them across New York City in addition to the five brick-and-mortar facilities that the New York medical examiner's office operates. What the medical examiner had done is said,"We can't hold these corpses any longer.
There's been a lot of coverage on the front-line health care workers, and I think that makes sense. They make people well, or at least try to. But what's not been really as widely covered or understood, it is the death care side of things. Because the flip side of any pandemic is the death, and how that work is being handled.
I think it's more of a philosophical question of the American psyche, of why we don't reflect on that, the sheer numbers of deaths that we've had in this country. I think there is an expectation and a hope that we get beyond this and maybe we don't want to confront the death. In a lot of ways, maybe we haven't really processed the numbers.
Amy Salit and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz and Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web.
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