Britain has recorded more COVID-19 deaths per capita than any other country, but Matthew Uden said he refused to be numbed by the escalating toll.
Britain’s funeral directors arranged around 90,000 more funerals in 2020 than in recent years, according to the National Association of Funeral Directors, a leading trade association. The company was founded in Victorian times, when London endured regular epidemics of smallpox and cholera. Today, it has seven branches in the capital and the neighboring county of Kent, where a deadlier and more transmissible variant of coronavirus emerged late last year.On the Thursday when Reuters visited, the company’s bearers carefully loaded coffins onto hearses parked outside its various branches.
The company already has 130 funerals booked for February, among them an unusual number of “double funerals,” of husbands and wives who die around the same time. In the mortuary, embalmer Mary Evans wears heavy duty personal protective equipment as she prepares the body of elderly COVID victim, and doesn’t move the body more than necessary in case the lungs expel infected air droplets.
His eyes teared up when he recalled a “remarkable” 12-year-old girl who, despite losing her father to COVID, brimmed with strength and positivity at his funeral.