[custom_adv] Jenny doesn’t remember the first body she turned away in the pandemic but she does remember the first one that made her cry. A man called — every hour, at least four times in one day — about his friend lying dead in a nursing home. [custom_adv] “I need help,” she recalls him saying. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to leave him to be thrown in a potter’s field. Please, you gotta help me Jenny.” [custom_adv] “I really couldn’t do anything and that broke my heart,” says Jenny. “It’s not that we are turning you away. We just need to buy time.” [custom_adv] The death toll in the United States is now the highest in the world. A third of U.S. deaths, more than 13,000, have been in New York City. [custom_adv] New York, the most-populous city in the United States, has just four crematories. [custom_adv] Death in a pandemic isn’t pretty. The refrigerated trailers outside of the hospitals don’t have enough shelving and bodies are sometimes stacked on top of each other and on the floor. Some trailers don’t have lights. [custom_adv] Hospitals, which used to store bodies for 14 days now sometimes will only keep them for six. The phones in the funeral parlor ring constantly, punctuated by ambulance sirens. Suppliers say they are running out of caskets and urns. Jenny says she no longer hands families the casket catalog; she just asks what color. [custom_adv] “You have 20 other funeral directors ahead of you that have to get bodies out,” says Nicole. [custom_adv] “You see tons of body bags and tons of people and they’re labeled COVID-19, COVID-19, COVID-19. [custom_adv] It’s like a horror show.” And little stands between the women and the risks their work carries. No one even knows if the bodies of victims are contagious. Two weeks ago, the women ran out of gloves. [custom_adv] In that shortage, Jenny found an unexpected detente with the father of her daughter. “We hate each other,” she explains, but says she turned to him for help because he works in a hospital. He brought her gloves, a box of masks and an apron.