SAN ANTONIO — Business is up at Carter-Taylor-Williams Mortuary. It started picking up last March, when the coronavirus started claiming lives.
"I've never experienced anything like this," Vera Williams-Young said. " Never, never in my almost 30 years."
Williams-Young, who owns the mortuary, said she did not have a body count from the death surge. She is still trying to figure out how to measure the experience.
"I just wish that I knew something more to do for the families," she said. "But all I can do is pray for them because I know that we can't provide healing, but God can."
Typically, the 601 Center Street funeral home can hold up to eight bodies a week. The virus has now pushed the business beyond its limit.
"I've had to enclose one of our rooms to provide a cold room because we did run out of space," she said.
Williams-Young said the "cold room" elevates its capacity to 15 bodies at any given time for COVID-19 and other deaths.
Her staff is required to ask if a deceased individual passed from COVID-19 complications. In those instances, employees wear hazmat suits to embalm the bodies.
"We've done services for teenagers to people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 80s, 90s," she said. "We did one lady (who was) 97-years-old. She lived all these years fairly healthy, and then COVID takes her out."
Funeral services are smaller these days too. The funeral home's chapel is, usually, in use. Processions and repasses are either eliminated or altered to accommodate COVID-19-era compliance.
She said some pastors prefer her chapel to their sanctuary to cut back on crowding risks.
According to Williams-Young, some families fear catching the virus from deceased loved ones. So, they opt for cremation. The mortuary owner said she'd performed more cremations in 2020 than in her entire career.
"I have seen a tremendous increase in cremations," she said.
Her experience shows it's easier to bury someone than cremate now.
Death may be her business, but the years don't take the sting out of losing friends in the community.
"You end up burying people that you know, people you have known over the years," she said.
The bottom line may be getting better, but the price is emotionally trouncing.
"Sometimes it's a little bit overwhelming," she said.