The Death Industry, COVID-19, and the Invisibility of Compassion Fatigue
COVID-19 has completely overwhelmed our healthcare workers the past few months. Hospitals have been scrambling to scrape together tests, machinery, and time; as they run low on supplies, they’ve been wracking up sick patients in the ER waiting rooms.
Hospitals aren’t the only places that have seen a sudden increase in bodies though– the death care industry has also experienced an influx of corpses that are in need of care. A Brooklyn funeral home made headlines back in April after an odor was reported wafting from a U-Haul truck parked outside. Upon investigating the report, NYPD discovered approximately 100 bodies stored in the back of the trucks.
When questioned, the owner of the funeral home explained that they had run out of space for all the bodies. As the epicenter of the outbreak, New York City has struggled to manage the body count. Morticians are racing to take care of the corpses that are flooding their establishments. Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President, addressed the situation with the funeral home, stating “we have an emergency going on right now. I’m surprised we don’t have cars stuffed with bodies.”
Adams has begun to put together a task force in an attempt to curtail the problematic overflow. The situation is traumatising for both the families of those who have died and the workers who have to care for them post-mortem. “We’re going to bring people in the room in every aspect of this industry and sit down and hear directly from them what we should be doing to coordinate this operation,” he explained.
Medical workers have been in the public eye as they take care of the living, but those who work in the death care industry are fighting to do what they can to take care of the dead. Now in the time of COVID-19, they are up against a seemingly insurmountable wall of grief and compassion fatigue. Morticians, like nurses and doctors, now have to handle an unprecedented amount of stress that largely goes unacknowledged.
Report: Nicolette Schneiderman
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