NEW YORK — New York City’s funeral homes are so inundated with the bodies of people who’ve perished from coronavirus that some have been forced to stop making arrangements for mourning families.
John D’Arienzo, who runs a Brooklyn funeral home and is president of the Metropolitan Funeral Directors Association, said it’s like nothing he’s seen in his nearly 40 years in the business.
“It happened all at once (last Thursday). At a certain point, we couldn’t help anybody,” he told the Daily News on Friday. “I had to tell at least five families that we couldn’t help them. It’s a horrible thing for a funeral director to have to say.”
And it wasn’t just his funeral home.
“Any neighborhood, any ethnic group, any religious group — they were all inundated yesterday,” he said on Friday. “It was the worst I ever saw.”
Patrick Kearns, a fourth-generation funeral director who runs the Leo Kearns Funeral Home in Rego Park, said he handled about 70 funerals in March, nearly double the number of families he and his staff usually accommodate in a month.
“Right now, the whole system is overwhelmed,” he said. “There is just not enough capacity in the funeral homes in Queens and Brooklyn to handle the number of people dying right now.”
If families aren’t able to make arrangements for their loved ones to be taken by a mortuary within eight days of dying, the city begins the process of arranging its own burial.
Under normal circumstances that typically happens when a family can’t afford a burial, but with funeral homes now inundated with those who’ve perished from COVID-19, it’s a prospect that many more may soon face.
When asked Friday about delays families have encountered obtaining death certificates for their kin, Mayor de Blasio said he didn’t “have those details,” but that the city will hire people “to address this very painful reality.”
He also denied a report that suggested inmates from Rikers Island are burying people who’ve died from coronavirus on Hart Island, which has served as the city’s graveyard for the destitute and unclaimed for decades.
“We believe we’ll be able to come up with a system to accommodate families over time. We will not be using any inmates from our correction system in any way to address burial needs,” he said. “There is a plan in place. There is a lot of support from the federal government. We’ll find our way through.”
A de Blasio spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions about what the city is now doing with the bodies that families are unable to claim.
Funeral homes are not the only ones struggling with so many bodies.
“It’s crematories, it’s the medical examiner, it’s the Department of Health,” said Nicholas Farenga, a funeral director in the Bronx. “It’s not just one person. It’s the entire town.”
D’Arienzo’s family has been running the D’Arienzo Funeral Home in Williamsburg since the 1930s. He began working there in 1982.
The coronavirus pandemic is the worst period the funeral home has ever seen, he said.
Of 9/11, he said: “It doesn’t compare.”
“Every square inch of the tristate area was hit terribly hard with this,” he said.
Kearns said the emotional toll of dealing with so much death in so short a time is “tremendous.”
“I’ve lost 15 pounds in the past two weeks,” he said. “I’m just trying to take it one day at a time.”
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