“I just ask God to help me”: Texas funeral home was crushed to death as U.S. COVID number approaches 500,000 | The widest image

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

The large number of coronavirus deaths has overwhelmed many American funeral homes. Some family-owned businesses have handled a number of stressful cases, and some have seen the same number of deaths in a couple of months as they normally would in a full year, said Dutch Nie, a spokesman for the National Funeral Home Association.

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

The pandemic has brought about profound changes in the way Pryor should function. Overloaded hospitals want bodies to be removed quickly. It has been difficult to find trained personnel, coffins and protective equipment. And every day it causes a multitude of phone calls from families in pain and anguish.

Because the virus showed no signs of adhesion release and deaths increased during the summer and fall, exhausted Pryority Funeral Experience workers fell ill while others stopped smoking.

“People quit smoking because mentally they can’t do it,” he said. “I pray to God, it just gives me strength … I want to run away right now, to be honest … I’m worried about breaking up with myself, so I’m just asking God to help me.”

Sometimes the stories he hears at work haunt him.

Like the one they told him when he answered a COVID-19 call last weekend in The Woodlands, a Houston suburb.

A 30-year-old girl had just died from complications of the virus, a while after doctors performed a cesarean section on her to save the lives of her twins, as her condition deteriorated.

The next day, Pryor had difficulty processing the tragedy, one of hundreds of thousands that has marked a year of profound losses across the country and the world.

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

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

January was a terrible month. Although hospitalizations in Texas fell 10 percent last month, after a 36 percent increase in December, coronavirus deaths rose 48 percent, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

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

Its staff of four full-time employees and eight part-time workers being tense, he said.

Embalmers and other people who come in direct contact with bodies and are at higher risk of infection are hard to find, Pryor said. And coffins are scarce due to the pandemic. One Thursday earlier this month, Pryor’s uncle drove four hours from Dallas to deliver eight.

Work is so consuming, said Pryor, that there is little time left to perform the most essential personal tasks, such as cooking or spending time with your next ten-year-old.

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

Pryor grew up in rural Texas, the youngest of six and the only one of his siblings who did not attend segregated schools. The first time he did business with the funeral business was in the late 1970s, when the first of each month he helped illiterate members of his community with mail and bills at the local funeral home.

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

Since he started his own business in 1984, celebrating life even to death had always been the center of his profession, he said. But the coronavirus pandemic turned everything upside down, making it even harder to help people through the grieving process.

In late 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.

Under 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 next to a table with baseball caps for 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 lowered the casket to the floor.