What to Do with All the Bodies?
Jane Ellen Glasser “Bodies are coming out of our ears.” —Andrew T. Cleckley Brooklyn Funeral Home Director A warehouse in Cook County, Chicago, that once held simple cargo has been repurposed into a refrigerated morgue. Like frozen vegetables, the body bags are kept fresh. In Detroit’s Sinai-Grace Hospital, in vacant rooms, white body bags are piled like stacked logs waiting to become ash. At Brooklyn Hospital Center bodies covered in plastic are wheeled out on gurneys, then forklifted like rubbish into a refrigerated trailer. Because few morgues can hold even 200 bodies, on Utica Avenue in Brooklyn, a dreadful stench leaked from two rented U-Haul trucks outside a funeral home. |