As a restless tween growing up in Bay Ridge, Ali Meawad, now 33-years-old, discovered Green-Wood Cemetery on one of many long walks across his home borough of Brooklyn.
He was intrigued by its rambling pathways, centennial mausoleums, rolling hills and vistas of the Manhattan skyline. He returned regularly to keep his mind busy, he said. Now, nearly two decades later, the cemetery is his job.
Meawad is a certified crematory operator at the historic cemetery, part of an unseen crew of essential workers faced with unprecedented demands for their services as the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to climb. While new infections and hospitalizations from the current wave of COVID-19 have subsided, the backlog of bodies for cemetery workers is not letting up.
“Exhausted yes, we all are exhausted,” Meawad said during a brief break outside the crematorium in the middle of a 16-hour shift on a recent afternoon. “As soon as I go home, I have dinner, take a shower, try to watch TV. It never happens. I end up falling asleep and that’s it, I gotta go. I gotta wake up at two in the morning just to be here at 3 a.m.”
Ali Meawad
Two separate crews trade off shifts — seven days on, seven days off — to minimize the number of people they come in contact with. Shifts during those seven days can be longer than 17 hours, to maximize the number of bodies the crematorium can process in one day.
“I worry a lot about, ‘What are we gonna do the next day, what’s coming? How are we gonna deal with it?’” Meawad said. “And hoping to God this is all over.’”
Workers at Green-Wood are digging twice as many graves as usual each week, up to around 60, according to Eric Barna, the vice president of operations for the cemetery. But cremations, which are cheaper, are where the facility has been squeezed the most.
“[In] regular times you could call us in the morning to drop off a body or have a service that afternoon without a problem,” Barna said. Now, he said, they’re booked out five weeks in advance, with more than 600 appointments already scheduled.
The crematorium has five incinerators that can burn one body at a time; each body takes several hours to be fully reduced to ashes. In pre-pandemic times the cemetery would process around 60 bodies a week. Now, they’re up to 150, Barna said.
“It went from a normal day to a crazy day literally in like 24 hours at the beginning of this,” Barna said. “It was really rough the first few weeks. It was at the point we actually had to close the crematorium for a day or two just to catch up because we were so overwhelmed by it.”
On an average day before the pandemic about 150 New York City residents passed away, according to the city’s Bureau of Vital Statistics. Over the last two months, the average number of deaths each day was four times that.
The city, which tracks confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases, put the current death toll at 20,237 as of Tuesday afternoon. But the number of deaths either directly or indirectly linked to COVID-19 is likely 22 percent higher, according to a city health department report published Monday, with a combination of deaths that were either directly or indirectly related to the pandemic.
Funeral Homes, hospitals and the city Medical Examiner have struggled to keep up with the backlog of bodies. The city started temporary burials on Hart Island, but backed away from that plan after images of mass graves became public. Now, the city is freezing corpses for long-term storage at the 39th Street Pier in Sunset Park, in order to provide workers at cemeteries and crematoria a chance to catch up before the remains decompose.
And of course, the pandemic has transformed the way New York City residents can mourn the dead. Meawad said he used to offer families support when they came into the chapel attached to the crematorium leading up to the cremation.
“They [got] to say last goodbyes to their loved ones,” he said.
But now they can’t come. Instead, Meawad and his co-workers say the last goodbye.
“It does feel a little bit like a burden,” Meawad said. “I put as much respect as I can. I have to treat that person like if I knew that person for my whole entire life. And I would like to be treated the same way.”
