On a sun-soaked morning last month, a dozen mourners gathered by a freshly dug grave to bury four people who were cast into limbo as New York City contended with COVID-19. Each was among hundreds of people whose bodies have lingered in a temporary morgue that was set up at the height of the city’s coronavirus crisis last year and where about 200 bodies remain, not all of them virus victims. The fenced-off temporary morgue on a pier in an industrial part of Brooklyn is out of sight and mind for many as the city celebrates its pandemic progress by dropping restrictions and even setting off fireworks. But the facility — which the city plans to close by the end of the summer — stands as a reminder of the loss, upheaval and wrenching choices the virus inflicted in one of its deadliest U.S. hotspots. James Brown, George Davis, Diane Quince and Charles Varga died of various causes between three and nine months before their mid-June burial in Staten Island’s airy Ocean View Cemetery. Officials found no next of kin. “But we know that they lived, not friendless, but with friends and family,” Edwina Frances Martin, Staten Island’s public administrator of estates, told a handful of Brown’s friends and volunteers who attend such funerals. “Because now they’re all part of our family. And we’re a part of theirs.” Some New Yorkers are troubled that hundreds of others at the morgue still wait to be laid to rest. “Still these bodies wait — for what?” asks Kiki Valentine, a Brooklyn minister and funeral services assistant. She wrote to officials to seek an explanation and propose steps she feels could help, such as publishing public obituaries for the deceased. Virus deaths alone peaked above 800 a day citywide at one point in April 2020 — deaths from all causes usually average about 150 — and overwhelmed funeral homes, cemeteries and hospital morgues. The temporary morgue was established that month to give families more time to arrange funerals after the city shortened its timeframe for holding remains before burying them in a public cemetery on remote Hart Island. There is no rule for how long bodies can stay at the temporary facility. “There was way too much death for the system to handle,” recalls Amy Koplow, the executive director of the Hebrew Free Burial Association, which is interring some Jewish people who were at the temporary morgue. “We feel really good that we are able to bury these people who have been unburied and in limbo for so long,” she said. Still, Koplow feels the medical examiner’s office did its best in a maelstrom. Many cases require considerable searching for relatives, a will or other indications of the deceased’s wishes, she noted. As the medical examiner’s office prepares to close the temporary facility, the agency has stopped taking newly deceased people there, and investigators are working to contact relatives and determine final arrangements for the roughly 200 whose remains are left, spokesman Mark Desire said via email last week. That’s down from 750 when the agency briefed City Council members in early May, saying investigators had found relatives in most cases but was awaiting their decisions or had stopped hearing back from them. Desire didn’t respond to questions about where bodies removed from […]
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