Texas Embalmer Shares Nightmare COVID Experiences: 'Unlike Anything I've Seen Before'

"I don’t know how much longer I can keep working this way," the funeral professional told HuffPost.

Patrick Huey contacted HuffPost after reading a story about a Florida-based ICU doctor who broke down on CNN while being interviewed about patients dying of COVID-19. The Texas-based funeral professional, who has worked as an embalmer for the past 30 years and won the South Central Texas Funeral Directors Association’s first-ever Embalmer of the Year award in 2019, offered to share his own harrowing COVID-related experiences, as well as the toll working in the funeral industry during the pandemic is taking on him and his colleagues. His account below has been lightly edited for clarity. When COVID first started, we really didn’t know a whole lot about how it was spread ― or, really, much else. There just wasn’t a lot of information out there. A lot of the states were recommending or even mandating not embalming bodies because so much was unknown at the time regarding how contagious COVID was, how it was spread, the fatality rate, and what chemicals effectively killed it.