Traveling help

In 2020, when the pandemic hit and over 1,000 people were dying every day in New York City, Dave traveled there with a group to help out.

“That’s all we did for 12 hours a day was remove dead people from hospitals, nursing homes and people’s houses,” Dave said. “They were so overwhelmed in New York City that the medical examiner couldn’t remove all of them. One of my bosses was a funeral director from California there, and we were talking about [how] we saw more dead people in one location than we did in our entire 25 year careers.”

He spent most of his time in Staten Island and Brooklyn, but he saw every borough in New York. They gave him a phone and three soldiers escorted him through the city. On one of his calls, the deceased lady had been dead for about five or six days in a decomposing state, and he had with him three dairy farm National Guard soldiers. 

“They were not doing well,” Dave said. “One was throwing up, and one was emotionally distraught. I said, ‘Well, y’all just go outside. I’ll take care of this.’ One of the guys came in, and he was a bounty hunter of all things. When we left, I remember they were all really disappointed in themselves. They’re like, ‘I should have been in there with you helping you get her in a body bag.’ They said, ‘How do you get in the car, and then you’re joking around with us about stuff?’ That’s what you do. You compartmentalize. You have to take the death, the scary things, the things nobody wants to see. You put that in a box, and you hold it in a box.”

All the funeral homes were full, so Dave had to take the deceased to a large morgue that could hold 50-1000 deceased. They would triple tag the deceased person, so they could find them later in the morgue when their funeral home came to gather them.

“You have to be able to do that [compartmentalize] because sometimes there’d be families there,” Dave said. “I can’t go in there and boohoo to them and cry to them. I’ve got to be strong for them. I have to be effective. I would have to talk to them. ‘Hey, we have to take your mother.’ We’d go to the family, and I’d say, ‘Hey, here’s the phone number you can call the medical examiner, they’re going to help you with this. Let me say the steps that are going to happen.’ We’re very respectful.”

Other than being able to stick the “scary” things in a box, the funeral directors need dark, gallows or morgue humor.

“It’s also disturbing, picking up arms, fingers, and legs,” Dave said. “So much is going on. You see things that no one else will ever most likely see. Then how do you return to normalcy? Nobody around you knows what it’s like to see all these crazy things.”