Bill Berkowitz: Bringing Out the Dead: a COVID-19 Story

June 24th 2020

New York Army National Guard Soldiers assemble cots at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City- an alternate care site to ease the bed shortage of New York Hospitals as part of the state response to the COVID-19 outbreak (photo by Senior Airman Sean Madden)

By Bill Berkowitz 

In New York City, bodies of the dead remained undiscovered in their apartments until neighbors smelled them decomposing. Many died in hospitals and nursing homes. Some died in alleyways, and cannot be identified. Some were identifiable, but family members couldn’t afford to bury them, or have them cremated. Outside of hospitals, refrigerated trucks were brought in and bodies were stacked like cordwood on three-tier-high platforms; up to 90 bodies in each truck. If bodies are unclaimed, they are sent to Hart Island, where the unknown and unidentified are placed in mass graves. 

In W.J. Hennigan’s late-May Time magazine report, titled “‘We Do This for the Living.’ Inside New York’s Citywide Effort to Bury Its Dead”, he wrote: “Much of New York City has been idle since the coronavirus lockdown was declared two months ago, but not the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal, an 88-acre shipping and distribution hub built in the 1960s on the east side of the city’s inner harbor, opposite the Statue of Liberty. Day and night, trucks back up to loading bays while 130 workers scamper between three football-field-size warehouses, waving in drivers and inspecting their freight. The traffic here is no longer in goods arriving from around the world, however. It is in the dead.”

Hennigan, who covers the Pentagon and national security issues for Time magazine, spent years covering conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Never, he said, had he seen anything remotely comparable to how deaths were dealt with in New York City during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. 

“One by one, [the bodies] are examined and entered into a computer tracking system,” according to Hennigan. “Then they are pushed up a ramp to a loading dock and stacked on wooden racks with 90 other corpses inside one of dozens of 53-ft. refrigerated tractor trailers set at 37°F to 39°F for storage.”

At the time of his report, there were some 20,000 dead in New York City alone. Handling the dead was, and now to a lesser degree, is a monumentally arduous task, since “The pandemic has overwhelmed the network of funeral parlors, mortuaries and morgues designed to process the dead.”  

Because of the death toll, funeral homes were overwhelmed. Regulations were loosened on crematories, which operate big brick ovens at up to 1800 degrees. The few that exist were running 24 hours a day. Some of the brick ovens “collapsed because of overuse.”

Unlike first responders, who have gotten long overdue recognition for their tireless work, death-care workers haven’t been nearly as “widely covered,” Hennigan, who spent more than a month working on the story, told Fresh Air’s Dave Davies. “The flip side of any pandemic is the deaths, and how that work is being handled.” 

In and of itself, removing bodies is not only gut-wrenching, but also physically challenging. “For two months, 30 three-person teams of National Guard members … joined officials from the medical examiner’s office in this ritual. Many of the troops had never so much as touched a dead body before. Now they see more corpses in a week than many soldiers see in a nine-month combat stint. It’s not just the COVID cases. They’ve had to help on all New York City deaths: picking up a suicide jumper off the pavement; holding their breaths to haul out two-week-old corpses from hoarders’ apartments; and tiptoeing around blood spatter at murder scenes.”

And there are the physical challenges: “Apartment buildings are a challenge. Hallways are often narrow. Sometimes the elevator is broken, forcing the team to haul a lifeless body down multiple flights of stairs. ‘It’s hard when you have to handle a body that’s been decomposing for an extended amount of time because the body is weak, it’s brittle in some areas, the skin is ready to peel off,’ Steve Ollennu, a Senior Airman pulled off his job installing communications equipment to retrieve bodies as grieving family members say their last goodbyes, told Hennigan. ‘You try to handle it in a respectful manner, so the survivors can see that their loved ones weren’t just manhandled and thrown in a bag.’”

 “The harder challenge is psychological,” Hennigan reported. 

How do you maintain your humanity in the face of so much dehumanizing death? Amid the crisis, the usually discreet network of humans entrusted with caring for our dead and helping us mourn has struggled. Reinforcements from the National Guard have been called in, with part-time soldiers like Senior Airman Steve Ollennu pulled off his job installing communications equipment to retrieve bodies as grieving family members say their last goodbyes. City officials like Frank DePaolo, who handled the dead after 9/11 and now oversees mortuary operations for the chief medical examiner’s office, are working 12-hour shifts trying to ensure a modicum of respect for those brought into the disaster morgues. Funeral directors like John D’Arienzo search for small symbolic steps to honor the deceased in rituals so anonymous and restrictive, they are no longer called wakes or visitations but rather ‘identification ceremonies.’

Hennigan’s reporting -- from the collecting of bodies, to mortuary inspection and body preparation, to transporting bodies, and grave-digging and burial -- stings over and over again, as if you put your hand in a bush searching for a misplaced ball, and you come out of it with dozens of bees aggressively nursing on your fingers. 

These are the less traveled corners of the coronavirus pandemic. This wasn’t a covert undertaking, rather it was a reporter doing the tough, awkward, and often chilling work of reporting on a story that most of us are more than willing to let pass over us. 

With nearly 1,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. every day, and the overall death count approaching 125,000, funeral parlors and crematories where the death count is rising are no doubt operating at maximum capacity. The overriding thoughts amongst death care workers is being compassionate and respectful. “We don’t do this work for the dead,” said Frank DePaolo. “We do it for the living.”