‘I’m Just Asking God To Help Me’: Texas Funeral Home Crushed To Death As US COVID Toll Nears 500,000 The broader picture

“It’s just mentally taxing,” Pryor, 59, who runs a small funeral home with his wife Almika, told Reuters earlier this month.

The sheer number of deaths from the coronavirus has overwhelmed many U.S. funeral homes. Some family businesses have handled a crushing case, with some seeing the same number of deaths in a few months as normal in an entire year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.

“Most funeral home directors know it’s a 24-hour, 365-day career, but you’re just not used to working those hours every day,” Nie told Reuters.

The pandemic has changed the way Pryor should work. Overloaded hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly. It was difficult to find trained personnel, boxes and protective equipment. And every day brings a ton of phone calls from families in pain and distress.

Because the virus showed no sign of loosing its grip and the death toll increased in the summer and fall, exhausted employees at Pryority Funeral Experience fell ill while others quit.

“People quit because they can’t handle it mentally,” he said. “I pray God – just give me strength … I want to run right now, to be honest … I’m worried about falling apart, so I’m just asking God to help me.”

Sometimes the stories he hears on the job haunt him.

Like the one he was told when he answered a COVID-19 call on a recent weekend in The Woodlands, a Houston suburb.

A young woman in her 30s had just died of complications from the virus, some time after doctors performed a caesarean section to save the lives of her twins when her condition worsened.

The next day, Pryor had a hard time coming to terms with the tragedy, one of hundreds of thousands who suffered a year of great losses across the country and the world.

“I slept with it last night and I hate that, you know, when you put them to bed,” he said.

Pryor said he had never been more busy than during the pandemic. The deaths the funeral home dealt with in 2020 were more than double what he would see in a normal year.

January was a terrible month. Even as hospital admissions in Texas fell 10% last month from a 36% increase in December, coronavirus deaths were up 48%, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

“I adapt and I reject people because I can only do so much,” said Pryor.

His staff of four full-time employees and eight part-time workers is feeling the tension, he said.

Embalmers and others that come into direct contact with bodies and are at greater risk for contamination are hard to find, Pryor said. And chests are scarce because of the pandemic. On a Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight.

The work takes so much, Pryor said, that there is little time left to complete the most essential personal tasks, such as cooking or spending time with his 10-year-old son-to-be.

While caring for those who lost loved ones in his community, Pryor’s family faced their own grief. The virus took over his cousin and uncle, while his wife lost her cousin and her aunt to COVID-19.

Pryor grew up in rural Texas, the youngest of six and the only one of his siblings not attending segregated schools. His first foray into the funeral industry was in the late 1970s, when on the first day of the month he helped illiterate members of his community with their mail and bills at the local funeral home.

“I became addicted to helping people when they need help the most,” Pryor said.

Since he started his own business in 1984, celebrating life, even in death, has always been at the center of his profession, he said. But the coronavirus pandemic turned everything “upside down”, making it even more difficult to get people through the grieving process.

In late January, Pryor and his team arranged funeral arrangements for Gregory Blanks, a 50-year-old COVID-19 victim who ran a heating and air conditioning business in the Houston area. He was a huge fan of the Dallas Cowboys soccer team.

In keeping with current restrictions on preventing infections, only a limited number of family and friends were able to attend the funeral at San Felipe Community Cemetery, where a pastor spoke next to a table wearing baseball caps for the Cowboys and other Texas teams.

Blanks’s wife Lila, wearing a face mask with the logo of her husband’s company, watched solemnly as some of Pryor’s workers lowered the box into the ground.