‘I’m Just Asking God to Help Me’: A Texas Funeral Home is Crushed to Death as US US COVID Amounts Approximately 500,000 | The wider picture

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

The sheer number of coronavirus deaths has overwhelmed many U.S. funeral homes. Some family businesses have handled a huge case, and some have seen the same number of deaths within a few months as they would normally handle in a full year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesman for the National Funeral Directors Association.

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

The pandemic made drastic changes in the operation of Pryor. Overloaded hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly. It was difficult to find trained personnel, coffins and protective equipment. And every day brings a multitude of phone calls from families in pain and distress.

As the virus shows no sign of releasing its grip and increasing deaths during the summer and fall, exhausted Pryority Funeral Experience workers have fallen ill while others quit.

“People stop because they can’t handle it mentally,” he said. “I pray God, – just give me strength … I want to run away right now, to be honest … I’m worried I’m going to break down, and I’m just asking God to help me.”

Sometimes the stories he hears during work haunt.

Like the one told to him when he answered a COVID-19 call in The Woodlands, a suburb of Houston, this past weekend.

A young woman in her thirties has just died from complications of the virus, shortly after doctors performed a C-section to save the life of her twins as her condition deteriorated.

The next day, Pryor had a hard time dealing with the tragedy, one of the hundreds of thousands of people who had a year of great loss throughout the country and the world.

“I slept with it last night and I hate it, you know, if you take them to bed,” he said.

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

January was a terrible month. Even when hospitalizations in Texas fell 10% last month from a 36% increase in December, coronavirus deaths increased by 48%, according to a Reuters analysis of state and provincial data.

“I do fit myself and I reject people because I can do just as much,” Pryor said.

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

Embalmers and others who come in direct contact with bodies and have a higher risk of infection were found difficult, Pryor said. And there is a shortage of closets due to the pandemic. On a Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight of them.

According to Pryor, the work is so consuming, there is still little time left to perform the most important personal tasks, such as cooking or spending time with his upcoming ten-year-old son.

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

Pryor grew up in the Texas countryside, the youngest of six and the only one of his siblings who did not attend isolated schools. His first issue with the funeral home was in the late 1970s, when he would help the first of every month illiterate members of his community with their jobs and accounts at the local funeral home.

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

Since starting his own business in 1984, the celebration of life, even in death, has always been an important role in his profession, he said. But the coronavirus pandemic has ‘turned everything upside down’, making it even harder to help people through the grieving process.

At the end of January, Pryor and his team handled the 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 big fan of the Dallas Cowboys football team.

In line with current restrictions to prevent infections, only a limited number of family and friends were able to attend the funeral at San Felipe Community Cemetery where a preacher spoke at a baseball cap table for the Cowboys and other Texas teams.

Dressed in a face mask with the logo of her husband’s company, Blanks’ wife Lila solemnly watched as some of Pryor’s workers dropped the coffin into the ground.