I had a rather dark start to my day this morning, leading to some news I hadn’t previously considered about the current pandemic. I was out on my front porch a little after six o’clock when I saw one of my neighbors pulling into his driveway. He’s the manager of a local funeral home and generally doesn’t leave for work until closer to eight, so that was a little unusual. After our normal greeting across my driveway, I asked him what led him to be out and about so early. I will transcribe our brief conversation here as closely as possible.

“I had to go down early and sweep out the crematorium.”

“That’s sort of a grim way to start your day. Something special going on?”

“Not really. We just have a lot of extra bodies to deal with. They’ve been shipping them up here from New York City.”

(I paused for a moment while the obvious thought crept into my brain.)

“Are they victims of the virus?”

“Most of them, yes. They just don’t have room down there so our guys are working overtime.”

“I assume you’re taking extra precautions. Masks and gloves and such?”

“Yes, but we’re not too worried. They passed away several weeks ago and the virus doesn’t live that long.”

I thanked him for the service his operation is providing and wished him good luck. But I was left wondering how common this is. We live well upstate from the Big Apple and have thankfully been left largely untouched by the pandemic by comparison. (We’ve had a total of just over a dozen deaths in our county thus far.) I went and did some checking and found that New York City has been outsourcing cremations for the past month, frequently to crematoriums that are five hours or more away from the city by car. (USA Today)

The cremators at Green-Wood Cemetery start their day at 6 a.m. They pull on gloves, masks and other protective gear, spray down caskets with bleach and ignite the cremation chamber, known as a retort. They hope for cardboard caskets – fancy lacquered wooden ones take longer to burn.

By the end of their 12-hour shift, they will slide 25 caskets through the cemetery’s five retorts – more than twice the normal volume – and let the flames and 1,600-degree heat devour the remains. The shift is repeated seven days a week, nonstop, as the coronavirus delivers a steady stream of bodies to Green-Wood and other crematoriums around the country.

“It seemed like it went from zero to 60 in two seconds,” Eric Barna, vice president of operations at Green-Wood, a historic cemetery in New York City’s Brooklyn borough, said of the spike in cremations. “The numbers just skyrocketed.”

If you read further down in the linked article, there’s one nugget of information that I found absolutely shocking. While we hear plenty about other services, particularly in the healthcare field being overwhelmed during the pandemic, there hasn’t been as much discussion about this. New York City has a population of more than eight million people and there are four crematoriums operating in the five boroughs.

At the peak of the outbreak in Gotham, there were more than a thousand people dying per day. Even now, after things have begun to ease up, there are still more than 400 deaths on average each day. And as my neighbor previously pointed out to me, a lot more people are opting for cremation. The reason is the state restrictions on funerals and viewings, with large gatherings of people being forbidden. This has led many families to look into cremation as an alternative so they can save the ashes for a memorial service one the restrictions are lifted.

I understand this is a grim topic to start off the day, but I found these revelations somewhat shocking and an aspect of the pandemic that I hadn’t previously given much thought. The novel coronavirus isn’t just affecting the way we live. It’s also impacting how we die and how our families celebrate our lives.