A mass-casualty event every day

Fourteen bodies are stored on newly installed shelves in this small-town mortuary’s freezer. Since the pandemic hit here last spring, it has become a crowded bunkhouse for the dead.

Valley Ridge is the only mortuary for hundreds of miles, on the western side of Navajo Nation, a vast expanse that encompasses territory in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. It is the largest Indian reservation in the United States, where covid-19 has killed Native Americans at roughly 2.6 times the rate of Whites.

One of them was John Bigman. He was 71 when the virus killed him.

It takes just a few minutes for mortuary employee Mike Carroll and his boss to find Bigman in the freezer, his name scrawled across a white body bag. Together, they lift him into a steel casket.

Soon, Carroll is at the wheel of a hearse, moving swiftly across the desert. Bigman is in the back. At a cemetery 100 miles down the road, the dead man’s family will be waiting for him.

The sun is just above the horizon, illuminating the silhouettes of sandstone mesas and power lines.

Carroll, a 55-year-old with a salt-and-pepper ponytail that hangs nearly to his belt, was a jewelry artist in the pre-coronavirus era, traveling to art shows around the region.

Since he started working at the mortuary four months ago, the travel has increased. He occasionally logs 600 miles a day, depending on the distances of burials and whether he makes a run to Phoenix to pick up more caskets. Valley Ridge performed five burials a day the week before.

As he drives, he passes low-slung houses, trailers and shacks set sporadically amid the sagebrush and juniper, dusty lots occupied by broken-down cars and the occasional herd of goats.

Carroll realized the other day that these landmarks no longer stir fond memories of art and gatherings. They remind him of loss.

He thinks about the speech one man made at a recent funeral, how he described the importance of juniper to Navajo culture — for medicine, for ceremonial adornment, for the blue-corn porridge shared between husband and wife at weddings. It is a culture that seems to be disappearing more rapidly with each elder’s death.

Carroll talks to Bigman. “I’m taking you home,” he tells him, his voice raspy and soft. The Navajo believe life is a circle, so he tells Bigman that he is helping him to complete the circle.

In less than an hour now, they’ll be at the cemetery.

Alarms blare in the medical-surgical intensive care unit. The patient in Room 9 has had a sudden drop in blood pressure. Doctors and nurses scramble to administer medication.

Crisis averted, the team assembles: four residents, two fellows specializing in intensive care, a pharmacist and Brad Butcher, the physician who directs this 24-bed unit at UPMC Mercy hospital.

Butcher, just back from vacation, started his day two hours earlier. On his computer, he clicked through the charts of the 23 people in the ICU, taking notes on their conditions, medications, prognoses — anything that might affect their care.

At a meeting before morning rounds, Butcher lit up at the mention of a woman in Room 7, whom he admitted 38 days ago. She can hardly move, and thick fluid rattles in her lungs. But she is still alive and slightly improved. Butcher, 41, would not have predicted this when he left for vacation two weeks earlier.

Her survival, he’ll say later, makes his heart feel like it is singing.

Now, he and his team creep through the narrow corridor outside the glass doors of single rooms, as the machinery of intensive medical care beeps and blinks around them. They push two computers on wheels that allow them to look up information and add notes on how they will treat each patient.

In Room 4 lies Ram Rai, a heavy smoker whose vulnerability to covid-19 is heightened by lung disease and diabetes. Butcher knows he has little time left. Outside the room, a resident begins to outline his plan. Butcher stops him.

“Is he going to leave the hospital alive?” Butcher asks.

“No.”

“So we just need to call the family today. So you just need to help them understand, despite the cultural issues, that he is going to die,” Butcher says. “Some families get it at the first conversation. And for some, it’s a journey.”

Covid-19 has made these conversations much more difficult. With visitation restricted, families do not witness a loved one’s decline. A phone call is a poor substitute.

But Butcher has become practiced at this grim skill. They will find the time, find the words. For now, rounds must continue.

Ms. Crystal would have been here by now.

She would have waltzed into the child-care center about 8:45 a.m., offered a singsong “good morning,” paused for a temperature check, then headed down the hall toward the big office adorned with her awards and diplomas and the calendar on which she had jotted that the annual report was due at the end of January.

Instead, Tiffany Lewis, the preschool teacher who records the temperatures of the puffy-coated children and anyone else who enters Little Flowers Early Childhood and Development Center, is alone in the cramped entrance vestibule. It is the center’s first day open since winter break. And it is the first day open since Crystal Hardy-Flowers, its founder and director, died of covid-19 on New Year’s Eve. She was 55.

“She always said that she was going to outlive all of us,” says Lewis, 39, standing near a folded wagon.

Lewis was the first teacher Hardy-Flowers, a social worker, hired when she started this place in one of Baltimore’s roughest neighborhoods in 2008. The first time they met, Lewis was struck by how much Hardy-Flowers looked like singer Patti LaBelle. They hit it off immediately.

To her staff, Hardy-Flowers was a champion, a friend, a mother. To her community, she was a pillar. The center stayed open throughout the pandemic. Hardy-Flowers knew the kids she served — from 6 weeks to 12 years old — needed someplace to go. Many of their parents are essential workers.

Hardy-Flowers had a lung condition, and she fell ill in mid-December. About a week before Christmas, she called an ambulance.

Lewis bought soup, orange juice, cough drops and flowers and arranged them in a basket from a dollar store. She took it to the hospital, but the staff turned it away. The gifts weren’t sterile.

“I was hurt, because my pastor always told me, ‘You give people their flowers while they’re alive,’ ” Lewis says. “Never got a chance to.”

Lewis scrolls through her phone for the last text she sent Hardy-Flowers.

Dec. 31, 9:44 a.m.: Three red hearts and two words: “FIGHT CRYSTAL.”

“Let’s see what we’ve got cooking,” says 60-year-old Eric Brown, notably cheerful for a lifer in the business of death.

With a few keystrokes on his office computer, he knows it will be another busy week.

Lately, they’ve all been busy. Brown and his father have run Rest Haven Funeral Home and Cemetery for more than three decades. It’s never been like this.

Multiple services are held every day in the funeral home, a modern concrete-and-glass structure amid 52 acres of grass, trees and headstones.

“We can’t get the graves dug fast enough,” Brown tells a caller.

Many of the deaths are from covid-19. Cases began to surge in November. Two months later, the staff at Rest Haven is still feeling the consequences.

It doesn’t help that the cemetery is built atop an enormous slab of limestone. Dig down a foot, and you’re likely to hit rock. Two days later, you could still be digging.

There’s no time for that now. In recent weeks, Rest Haven has had to call in explosives experts to lay dynamite.

Mike Carroll turns down a dirt road toward the community cemetery.

The graves are short hills of red dirt topped with bouquets of fake flowers. Some have tiny American flags stuck into the earth, others modest white crosses. One is dotted with colorful glass pebbles. Six Budweiser cans are lined up atop another.

On all sides of the horizon are towering red buttes — Monument Valley’s monuments.

John Bigman’s sister and brother stand beside their trucks and an open grave. Carroll greets them solemnly in Navajo, his first language and theirs, too.

Bigman’s wife of 25 years and the couple’s two grown children arrive. She clutches a metal placard that reads “John Paul Bigman, 1950-2021.” She sees the hearse, the grave, the relatives, and she starts to cry.

A pastor in a black cowboy hat, mask across his face, leads a prayer that flows between Navajo and English. A speaker plays “Amazing Grace” in Navajo.

Bigman was one of 12 siblings. He worked in a coal mine on the reservation for 28 years, his niece says through tears, reading the eulogy. He loved hunting. He did horse tricks. He told jokes. And he loved to perform Navajo songs and dances.

As a tractor pushes dirt into his grave, across the cemetery appears another cluster of trucks, another group of tearful relatives, another casket.

Bigman’s family can’t hear their voices over the wind. But they know that other family. They know they are from the same small town. They know that they, too, are burying someone they lost to the coronavirus.

“I want to say something,” says Sheldon Hopkins, a 7-year-old in a lemon-yellow coat. His feet dangle from a chair on the third floor of Little Flowers Early Childhood and Development Center. “She was the best.”

“You loved her, right?” Jamaal Miller says gently. “Yeah. It’s very sad.”

Miller, 32, is sitting in a circle with Sheldon and four other children. In normal times, they attend the center’s after-school program. Now, they’re here all day, watching their teachers via laptops. Miller, the aftercare coordinator, has become a virtual-learning supervisor.

Some of the kids have attended Little Flowers since they were babies. They knew Crystal Hardy-Flowers as the principal who danced with them on Fridays and gave them candy from a stash under her desk, even when they were sent to her office for misbehaving.

She is gone now, and Miller knows the kids might want to talk about it. He had dreaded coming back to work, but he figured the kids would buoy him. He just hoped he wouldn’t cry.

A first-grader in a polka-dot mask gets up to whisper in Miller’s ear.

“You feel like you’re going to cry? You want a hug?” Miller pulls her to his side, where she lingers.

The conversation veers wildly. Sheldon asks whether Hardy-Flowers built the center, which is part of a church campus. They talk about the cotillion dances she held, to make them feel like royalty. Miller shows a video of Hardy-Flowers dancing, and everyone howls in laughter. They bust up again when Sheldon states, matter-of-factly, that Hardy-Flowers had false teeth. (She did not, Miller assures.)

“I’m confused,” says Hayden Simmons, a 9-year-old in a tie-dyed sweatshirt. “Who’s the new owner?”

Miller explains that Hardy-Flowers’s niece and daughter are now in charge.

“They are carrying on Ms. Crystal’s legacy,” Miller says.

“What if they both died in the future?” Hayden asks.

“I’m pretty sure that the way they have it set up, is that someone in the family possibly takes it over, and, you know, makes it great,” Miller says.

Sheldon considers this.

“This is still Ms. Crystal’s building,” he says. “Forever.”

The mortuary’s floor-to-ceiling whiteboard is a meticulous graffiti of black, red and green.

Not a slot is open from 8 a.m. through 9 p.m. Some have been booked twice. That will leave the drivers, embalmers, flower delivery staff and, in this age of covid-19, the cleaners more stressed than usual.

The six hooks for keys to the mortuary’s vans and hearses are empty save one. Each is out on a pickup.

This is mortuary supervisor Gail Governale’s domain, a hallway-turned-logistics-center on the second floor of the Guerra Gutierrez Mortuary, a fixture along East Beverly Boulevard.

The mortuary, a stucco and red-tile-roof building, manages 800 cases a year in normal times. It has tripled that pace since the pandemic began.

“I say fill it to the rim with Brim,” says Governale, 59, dating herself with an allusion to an old coffee commercial.

Of the 40 names on the board, only two are not Latino. Most come from within a five-mile radius.

This morning, the mortuary already has dispatched eight bodies to churches or burial sites. It has turned down three families seeking services for relatives who died over the weekend. Never before in its 76-year history has the mortuary had to do so.

Lori Silva, an administrator and a 36-year veteran of the industry, peers over Governale’s shoulder. She carries a sheaf of forms, each held together with a thick green Guerra Gutierrez clip.

“We just got seven more cases over the weekend,” Silva says.

A deep breath, not quite a sigh, and Governale looks at the board.

Willis Prather, 101, is exhausted. The hospice workers visiting his home had just given him a bath and a shave. He had been fine on his own until two weeks ago, when he was hit by the coronavirus and collapsed in the middle of the night. At the hospital, doctors found bleeding in his brain.

Outside the single-story brick home surrounded by trees, hospice nurse Loren Ducote opens the trunk of her car and begins donning layer after layer of protective equipment.

The pandemic has deprived her of essential tools — the ability to touch and hold dying patients’ hands, to hug their grieving family. “They can’t even see me smile when I talk to them,” she says.

Inside, Prather lies in a medical bed in his living room. Ducote, 26, makes small talk as she gently examines his body with her gloved hands.

“You’re looking all sharp after that clean bath and shave. Doesn’t get any better than that, huh?” she says. Prather smiles and nods.

It is unclear how much longer he has left — months, maybe weeks.

During the 30-minute drive here, Ducote had made a mental list of the things she would check as soon as she arrived: the color of Prather’s skin, the noises in his chest, the ability of his eyes to focus on her. Each can be a sign of the inexorable march of death.

As a nurse for the organization Heart of Hospice, Ducote’s primary job is to read those signs and explain them to the patient and his family so they can navigate each step with as much dignity and peace as possible. But she knows she is also there to listen to venting, to counsel, to help grieve.

“My job is to be whoever they need me to be,” she told herself before knocking on Prather’s door.

At Prather’s bedside a few minutes later, she asks him, “Are you hurting anywhere today? You feeling any shortness of breath?”

Prather shakes his head and tries to say “no.” It comes out as a mumbled “naaaaugh.”

Ducote studies Prather’s skin. Patients often grow ashen as their body struggles for nutrients. Their skin becomes mottled with reddish-purple splotches as their heart pumps less blood to parts of the body that need it.

Prather’s skin still has a healthy pinkish hue.

She listens with a stethoscope to his lungs. Hospice patients with covid-19 often evince coarse gurgling sounds as they develop pneumonia.

Prather’s breathing is quieter than healthy patients’, but with none of the gurgling, crackling or wheezing that might signal rapid decline. Another good sign.

It was 13-year-old Caleb Sun’s idea to have a virtual memorial service for his father, and he always planned on giving a speech.

But when it’s his turn to speak at the rehearsal, his Zoom rectangle expanding to fill the computer screens of his relatives and the staff of GatheringUs, the New York company hosting the event, Caleb suddenly turns shy.

“I’m just going to let my mom talk here,” he says, wrapping an arm around Amy Sun.

Caleb is decisive and self-assured. He helped pick the music for the service, nixing the Lady Gaga songs suggested by an aunt and giving a thumbs-up to Hootie and the Blowfish, a favorite band of his dad, Barry Sun.

Yet the past few weeks have been unimaginably difficult for Caleb. The night before his dad’s death from covid-19 on Dec. 18, father and son were playing video games. Barry, 56, felt a little sick. The flu, he figured. In the morning, he was gone.

The abrupt loss shook everyone in his life, but no one more than the only child at its center. For every remarkable thing about Barry — the charm that made him a standout salesman, the playfulness that made him the “cool uncle,” the head-turning style — his love for his son stood out most.

“Amy, are you going to speak also?” the tech guy asks.

She says no; Caleb says yes. Amy and Barry separated years ago and split parenting duties. Still, she’s nervous at the prospect of talking about something so personal in front of the dozens who will gather over Zoom two days from now — loved ones scattered from California to Canada to China.

They move onto other details — how to introduce the friends and relatives who plan to talk, how guests can raise their hands to share stories about Barry.

Amy and Caleb can decide later who will speak.

The Rev. Ivan Montelongo focuses this morning’s homily at St. Raphael Parish on banishing the earthly demons that consume people. Addiction. Anger. Injustice. Illness.

He dwells on that last one.

Montelongo’s priesthood has been immersed in it since the start. The 27-year-old priest was ordained last summer in the middle of the pandemic.

About 50 people are scattered in the pews. On every other seat, a laminated paper marked with red or green indicates whether it is safe for sitting.

Later today, Montelongo will commandeer a hotline the Catholic Diocese of El Paso set up as part of its new covid ministry. For months, three of the diocese’s youngest priests have been summoned to visit the sick and dying. They pray over unconscious patients on ventilators, anoint the ill and represent families who must watch a relative die over Zoom.

He can’t explain it, but Montelongo feels like his intimacy with the frailty of human life is numbing his sensibilities.

Montelongo forgets the names, the faces, the dates — but not the weight. There was the newborn of a coronavirus-positive mother he had to baptize because the baby wasn’t expected to survive. There was the first time he heard a doctor explain in emotionless detail what happens to a patient after the machines are disconnected.

It is a privilege, he says, to accompany a family in their hope and grief. The work is emotionally exhausting.

“I would love for this to stop,” he says after Mass. “I talk to friends, but I don’t want to pass it on … the shock of death.”

LaVondria and Ebbie Herbert arrive early to the appointment. The Detroit fire training academy is packed with other emergency workers who have come for coronavirus vaccinations. LaVondria, a police officer, and Ebbie, a firefighter, wave to friends and co-workers.

Both wear black T-shirts with the name “Skylar” printed on the front.

Skylar was just 5 when she was infected with the virus in March, as the first wave hit the United States. She complained one day that her head hurt. Her condition deteriorated quickly. Skylar developed a rare complication — a form of meningitis that caused her brain to swell.

She struggled for two weeks on a ventilator before dying April 19, becoming Michigan’s youngest victim.

Skylar was the couple’s only child, and they were beside themselves with grief. But there was a larger crisis going on, so they soon went back to work.

When LaVondria and Ebbie heard emergency responders would be among the first to get the vaccine, they were scared. They knew how quickly it had been developed, and that some people had had allergic reactions. They talked about not wanting to be “guinea pigs.”

After further research, Ebbie was convinced they should get it. LaVondria was still unsure. Finally, three days before their scheduled shot, they turned to the infectious-disease doctor who oversaw Skylar’s care. She recommended the vaccine without hesitation, tipping the scales for LaVondria.

When a nurse calls their names, Ebbie is surprised to hear LaVondria volunteer to go first. She holds tightly to a stuffed rainbow bear, what Skylar called a “plushie.”

“I’m just glad I did it,” LaVondria tells a local news crew. “We’re just trying to get back to some type of normalcy.”

Ebbie gets a shot in his left arm, where he has a tattoo of Skylar. He thinks of her as the needle goes in. He feels relief. He feels sad, missing his daughter. He feels hope, that the vaccine will prevent others from losing their children.

He does not say any of this out loud. Instead, he just tells everyone: “Excuse me if I become emotional.”

Michael Begay, the owner of Valley Ridge Mortuary, pulls a wooden casket out of a white shipping container. In the freezing shade, he opens it and readies the satin bedding.

From a cardboard box containing an 83-year-old’s belongings, he unfolds a purple blanket and lays it inside the casket. He unwraps a white patterned blanket and places it on top of that. Then, he walks to the mortuary’s outdoor freezer, dons plastic gloves and pulls a gurney inside.

“Where is Mary?” he says to himself.

She is there, on the bottom shelf.

One of Begay’s employees arrives, and together they lift Mary, still in her body bags, into the casket.

Had she not died of the coronavirus, they would get to see her face. They would dress her in the finery her family provided. Instead, she must stay in the bags.

He unfolds a purple velvet skirt and blouse and lays them over Mary’s body. The blouse has a heavy silver-and-turquoise collar and brooch. He places silver-and-turquoise bracelets where her wrists would be, and at her feet, a pair of moccasins with socks tucked in.

Begay folds the blanket over her and the bedding over that. He reviews the family’s inventory to make sure he fulfilled all their requests. Then, he wipes down the wood until it gleams in the sunshine.

As a hearse carries Mary away, Begay goes back inside, where a dry erase board lists 14 names. Each corresponds to a body in the freezer. Seven names are marked “C+” for covid-19-positive.

He erases Mary’s.

The cheerful chime of the Rev. Ivan Montelongo’s iPhone rings out with the first call of his hotline shift.

The baritone of a security guard at University Medical Center booms through the line. The family of a covid-19 patient is asking for a priest, the guard says.

“3:30?” Montelongo says, scribbling on a Post-it note. “Via Zoom?”

Soon, Deacon Victor Acosta enters the rectory office. His greeting is curt and muted.

“Something is wrong,” Montelongo says after the deacon walks by.

Acosta reappears minutes later, on the verge of tears. Another parishioner, a longtime member of St. Raphael, contracted the virus, the deacon tells Montelongo. The family has decided to take the man home to die.

“It keeps getting closer and closer,” Acosta says. Several parish members have died in recent months.

Less than an hour later, the priest’s phone rings again. It’s about the parishioner Acosta mentioned. His daughters ran out of time to take him home. They need a priest at an East El Paso hospital, now.

Montelongo hastily updates Acosta on the parishioner’s decline before rushing out.

He should have delivered the news to the deacon more gently, the priest says, as he retrieves a sheet of prayers, laminated to make sanitizing easier.

“But for us,” Montelongo says, “it’s just so commonplace.”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” whispers James Frederick, as he places one dusty work boot in front of the other, pacing off the cemetery’s newest grave. “Okay, we’re good.”

Frederick and his digging partner, Tray Redmon, never know what might lie beneath the cemetery’s manicured grounds until their shovels connect with the earth. If they’re lucky, it’ll just be dirt. Unlucky could mean giant rocks or venomous spiders.

They start with shovels, marking the grave’s perimeter. Then, it’s time to bring in the backhoe.

Frederick, a black balaclava obscuring his face, handles the controls. Redmon, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, climbs in and out of the grave, shovel in hand, guiding the work.

For three hours, they operate with the precision of dance partners, their movements finely choreographed.

“All we have to do is look at each other and we know what’s up,” says Frederick, 42. “I see this man more than I see my family.”

They’ve worked together for years, but that has never been truer than now.

Many of the holes they’re digging these days, Frederick says, are Christmas graves. “Everyone was gathering. No one was paying attention to the CDC guidelines. This is the result, unfortunately,” he says.

He takes a tape measure and counts. Fifty inches deep. Perfect. (“Six-feet-under is a myth.”) The length and the width are exactly right, as well.

Redmon uses the back of his shovel to smooth the chocolate-colored soil at the grave’s bottom. With a fine-bristled brush, Frederick scrubs the dust from a headstone etched with the words “Love of my life.”

“That,” Frederick says admiringly, “is how a grave is dug.”

Emilio Carbajal, just three months on the job at Guerra Gutierrez Mortuary, grabs the keys to a white Dodge Caravan and begins his rounds. Two pickups at L.A.-area hospitals. Covid-19 cases.

The mortuary is out of gurneys. As fast as they arrive empty, they are pulled into service again.

So Carbajal’s first stop is to pick some up at the mortuary’s freezer on Pomona Boulevard, a low building that does not announce its use. He pulls into the back alley, in front of an open sliding steel door.

Four bodies in boxes wait in the first vestibule for room in a freezer.

In a freezer to the left, the bodies are stacked in racks, on gurneys, some covered entirely in sheets, some peeking out from openings in the plastic. A patterned blanket is wrapped around an older man; a sheet dotted with tiny monkeys covers another.

The next room is equally over capacity. And the one after that.

“You really can’t take two steps in here,” Carbajal says.

He walks back to a kind of office-workshop.

“I hate you,” Jackie Zaragoza, 35, tells Carbajal with a sheepish smile as he walks into her embalming area. Her sweatshirt bears a picture of Marilyn Monroe blowing a bubble-gum bubble. Above the image it reads: “Being Normal is Boring.”

There are 100 bodies in Zaragoza’s freezer, nearly all of them covid-19 cases.

Zaragoza’s time is beyond tight. With a body, its head wrapped in clear plastic, just feet away, she is trying to gobble down a Chick-fil-A breakfast sandwich and stay on schedule. “We work until we’re finished,” she says.

Carbajal, 28, grabs two gurneys, wheels them into the alley and slides them into the Caravan, then heads for the hospitals.

There is a refrigerator truck just down the alley. It, too, is holding bodies. Guerra Gutierrez Mortuary split the rental cost with Continental Funeral Home, also swamped with covid-19 cases.

The sun is climbing over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the soft light just beginning to warm the freezing morning air. Work is already underway on three graves — all a consequence of covid.

One is for a father who contracted the coronavirus and had seemed to be recovering at home, only to take a sudden downward turn.

His adult son was found dead at his side. His was not a covid death, a friend said. But it was nonetheless a consequence of the disease and all the grief that comes with it. Tomorrow, they will be buried together.

Halfway across the cemetery, a crew of three is readying a grave dug yesterday. It is time to prepare for the service.

They erect a red tent and position a platform to bear the coffin.

As they work, they talk about the disease that killed the man who will soon be buried beneath their feet.

They know it well: A coronavirus outbreak ripped through Rest Haven’s maintenance department this winter, putting some crew members out of work for several days, and others for several weeks.

Bryan Durboraw, a 26-year-old who fills graves by day and hunts ghosts by night, says covid-19 sent him to the hospital. “I went to bed, and I couldn’t breathe,” he says.

He has a baby on the way, and he feared they would never meet. He worried that his friends — the men he works with day after day — would have to bury him.

Though he rallied, the disease has had lasting consequences: He had never used an inhaler before. Now, he takes one wherever he goes.

“I always tell people to take covid seriously,” he says. “Because we see the end result.”

“How many are in the trailer right now?” coroner Scott Lynn calls into the next room, asking one of his remaining deputies for a count of coronavirus victims in the refrigerated trailer behind the Geisinger Medical Center.

The trailer has become a regional resource, storing bodies from the many small, rural counties in this part of Pennsylvania that lack facilities.

The result is that Lynn has an unusual workload, more befitting a good-sized city than a quaint town on the North Branch of the Susquehanna River. He’s running on fumes.

And his staffing situation, rendered borderline disastrous by the resignation Monday of his deputy, is about to take another blow: A second deputy is leaving for her final semester in college. Today is her last day.

In the span of three days, Lynn’s workforce will have dropped from five to three — and he’s one of the three.

He would like to hire someone. But it usually takes 18 months to find and train someone for this kind of work. And it’s not the kind of job that appeals to everyone, especially not during a pandemic.

“We deal with death on a normal day. We’re dealing with families now who may have potentially not seen their loved one before they died, because of isolation. There’s a lot of frustration and anger on the families’ parts. You try to help them through that. You don’t always have an answer.”

Lynn walks to the trailer, inside of which are nine bodies and a distinct chemical odor. It’s a combination of disinfectant and the new plastic of heavy, black body bags.

Soon, a funeral home picks up a deceased person. A coroner from an adjacent county drops off another. Workers slide the bagged bodies sideways into the racks in the trailer, which can hold up to 33.

“This is beyond anything I ever anticipated,” he says. “I’m feeling overwhelmed.”

In 2019, his office handled 900 deaths, and in 2020, the caseload jumped to 1,300. This year’s caseload has already neared 100, 57 of them coronavirus deaths. And it’s only Jan. 13, not even noon.

The elderly man came into the emergency department of Gallup Indian Medical Center a few hours ago. He doesn’t appear likely to make it out.

Gallup, N.M., population 21,854, is what’s known in this region as a “border town”— a locale just off the Navajo reservation, but in many ways a part of it. The hospital is administered by the federal Indian Health Service.

For the elderly man, what started out as a coronavirus infection complicated by underlying health conditions has triggered a heart attack.

Now, Michael Kelley, an emergency physician, is trying to track down the man’s family because the doctors need to know soon: Should the man be ventilated and resuscitated when it comes to that? Does his family want to keep him alive as long as they can?

The patient is too incapacitated to make the call himself. Kelley needs a relative. If they choose DNR — Do Not Resuscitate — then the focus will shift to mitigating any pain and discomfort the man is experiencing. If not, they will need to get him on a helicopter to another crowded — but bigger — hospital in Albuquerque.

Twenty minutes later, a phone rings in a tiny office that functions as the emergency department’s nerve center.

“Yes, ma’am, this is Dr. Kelley.” He listens to the woman speak. “That’s a very loving decision. We will take care and make sure he’s comfortable.”

The relative has chosen the DNR. In some ways, it’s a relief. Kelley knows the man will not survive, but DNR means they can keep him here, close to his home and family — and also preserve a scarce hospital bed in Albuquerque.

Inside the hospital room where he lies, the man is taking in extra oxygen through a tube, his chest rising and falling jerkily, his breathing labored. Kelley urges the woman on the phone to come quickly.

Nyesha Montes De Oca arrives at Guerra Gutierrez Mortuary with a silver makeup case and two shopping bags. She has an appointment with her mother, who died at 6:05 p.m. on Jan. 4.

She has not seen her mother since then. And she has not hugged her mother since April, when Montes De Oca moved her into a skilled nursing home.

A mortuary owner opens the chapel door for Montes De Oca, dressed in a black athletic pullover, jeans and black high-top Chuck Taylors. At the end of the room, Irene Gonzalez, 66, lies in a sea-green dress.

It was Montes De Oca’s request that she be allowed to apply her mother’s makeup and give her a pedicure.

“This was the last thing I wanted to do for her,” says Montes De Oca, who is 38.

She begins at the feet, flipping open the case for clippers and files. She paints in short, careful strokes — working around the toe tag listing the cause of death as covid-19.

The color: “Million-dollar Red.”

“It was her favorite, but they don’t make it anymore,” Montes De Oca says, a catch in her throat.

Gonzalez’s shoes sit next to her on the table. They are high heels, pink and red and sequined. She bought them for her daughter years ago.

“I told her they are way too girly for me, but that she should hold on to them,” she says. “Now, she’ll be buried with them.”

Her mother had always been “girly,” in Montes De Oca’s words. After emigrating from Jalisco, Mexico, as a young woman, Gonzalez won several local beauty pageants.

It was not her thing at all, but Montes De Oca agreed to humor her mom as a teenager, entering and winning a pageant in East Los Angeles. Gonzalez wore the sea-green dress the day of her daughter’s victory.

Montes De Oca grabs a few small compacts and a roll of brushes.

First, she rubs a little powder beneath her mother’s eye, one side, then the other, their faces just inches apart. She uses a small pencil to fill in her mother’s eyebrows, another to soften some smile wrinkles around the eyes. Then, she applies color to the closed lids.

At one point, to no one in particular, she says, “I’m barely keeping this together.”

She leans down to touch up her mother’s right eye, a gesture of poignant beauty, a daughter perfecting a last makeover for her mom.

After months apart, daughter and mother are together again.

Barry Sun’s friends and family enter the memorial service in bursts, the tiny boxes lining up across the top of the screen. They join the Zoom call from across the globe, with living rooms and offices and cityscapes as backdrops.

His sister thanks everyone for being here, saying her big brother’s death from covid-19 “has highlighted for me the massive devastation it causes, what it takes away from all of us.” She shares memories of growing up — the whole family playing mah-jongg while the smell of Peking duck wafted through the air on holidays; her brother sneaking his smelly judo outfit into her luggage before she left for college.

A best friend calls for everyone to commit to “Barry-style fun,” recalling the time his buddy pretended to be drunk as a group of friends sipped grape juice — an act so convincing they began to question what they were drinking. A niece remembers “Uncle B” spreading carrots and burnt crescent rolls in the yard on Christmas and waking the kids up with the news that the reindeer had “pooped on the roof and front lawn.”

Then, it’s Amy Sun’s turn. The first slide of the PowerPoint is light blue, the words, “In loving memory of my dad!!!” in cursive font across the page.

She flips from 2007, when Caleb was born, to 2020, when Barry died. There are photos of Barry gazing at a baby Caleb, holding him after preschool graduation, smiling beside him in front of oceans and mountains.

“In closing from Caleb,” Amy says, “my dad loved me very much and I’m going to miss him so much. I will always treasure the memories and all of the love that he showed me.”

She takes a breath before she continues.

“And to Barry,” she says, as Caleb puts his head on her shoulder and tells her she’s got this. “We will always love you, honor your memory on every holiday, every birthday, every momentous occasion and every day. And we will miss you dearly, until we meet again.”

There’s a toast to Barry, and then there’s laughter and tears. Many address Caleb directly. They tell him that his dad talked about him all the time, that they hope to be the kind of father he was.

In the end, the screen turns to a photo. It’s Barry, beaming.