Nightmare Every Day’: Inside an Overwhelmed Funeral Home

The works at Continental Funeral Home in East Los Angeles see themselves as “working-class emergency workers.” 

The pews and furniture in the chapel at the funeral home have been set aside to make room for the dead as they outnumber the living that once met there to remember the dead. 

Last month, there were four bodies in cardboard boxes, two bodies in open coffins, seven wrapped in white and pink sheets, 18 in closed coffins where the pews used to be, and 31 on the shelves of racks against the walls. 

The bodies added up to a total of 62. 

People typically forget about funeral homes until they need them. The effects of the coronavirus pandemic have sent the industry into “disaster mode, quietly and anonymously dealing with mass death on a scale for which it was unprepared and ill-equipped.” 

California has recorded the most virus related deaths  of any state with 52,000. “At Continental, the brutal reality of the death toll hits the gut first, the eyes second.” 

See Manny Fernandez, A Nightmare Every Day: Inside an Overwhelmed Funeral Home, N.Y. Times, March 4, 2021. 

Special thanks to Lewis Saret (Attorney, Washington, D.C.) for bringing this article to my attention.