I was standing by my back door when my phone rang. It was midafternoon, April 13, 2020. I pulled the device from the pocket of the oversized hooded sweatshirt I’d taken to wearing for comfort as much as for its large pockets that held both my phone and my pulse oximeter. My fiancé Konstantin’s name was on the screen.For the past month, I’d rarely been able to answer my phone when it rang. I had been frighteningly ill with COVID since mid-March, and talking was difficult. I had to pull air from deep in my chest, exhale each word. Slow, labored, breathy. And after a few words, maybe a few sentences, a whoosh of darkness would envelop my head like a shroud. I had learned early in my infection that when that happened, I needed to lie down, to stop speaking. Immediately.I had been in and out of the emergency room, each time sent home from the overwhelmed hospital with instructions for bed rest, told to return if my breathing became more labored or I had trouble remaining conscious. So I spent each day at home on my red couch, silent, my head throbbing, depleted in every way yet rarely able to sleep. The couch is in my living room, a few steps from my kitchen where I could fill my water glass one or twice a day, and a few steps in the other direction to the bathroom, by the back door. I can see in my phone log that I took a total of 382 steps that day. I remember the effort of each one. This time when Konstantin called, I answered the phone. “Hello?”I could hear Konstantin trying to speak. It wasn’t lack of air that stopped the words. He was gasping through tears, “Tell me I’m doing the right thing.”“What…what happened?” My world froze as I waited for his response. So much could go wrong these days. So much already had.“A woman from West New York called. Her husband died. She said I was the 12th, or maybe 15th, funeral home she’d called.” He paused, “Nobody would help her.” I struggled to comprehend. “What? Why?”“He died at home from COVID. She has it, too. She has only $200. She’s home alone with him and nobody will come get his body because she can’t pay.” He paused again, “Some funeral homes aren’t even answering their phones anymore.” The police had come to the woman’s apartment in northeastern New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan, and they had left. The medical examiner must have signed off on the death certificate from afar, through the police. Nobody had ensured that a funeral home was handling the case. Nobody had bothered to make sure that a woman would not be left home alone with her husband’s corpse. I ran through the alternative in my head: If he had died in a hospital, he would have been alone. She wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye, but she wouldn’t have had a body in her bed. Dying in the hospital, dying at home—both scenarios were unfathomable, horrific. In what world is there no safe place to die?Konstantin’s voice shook. “I told her I would take care of her. I’m doing this through Temple. I’ll eat the cost.” Temple was his fledgling Jewish funeral home, a side business not yet breaking even, and separate from the funeral home where he worked full-time. “I don’t know how I will cover it, but I have to find a way.” Here, he paused before returning to his original question. “I made the right decision, right? It’s a mitzvah, right?” I knew he couldn’t see my nod, but I was breathing thick, heavy breaths, my chest heaving, trying not to cry. After several full breaths, I eked out a small croaky “yes.” Then as I steadied my breathing, “Yes, you are. You have to do this. We’ll figure out the money.” As I reassured Konstantin it would be OK, I was already silently planning to text the large set of moms on my group chat for help. They would have ideas; I was sure of it.Several were following not just my frightening illness but also Konstantin’s funeral work, asking for updates every day or so in the weeks since the pandemic had begun. His rising caseload and my touch-and-go health were stark reality checks for those stationed safely within their homes and removed from contagion.It was only four weeks after Konstantin’s first COVID funeral case on March 17, the same day my symptoms began, and the death calls were relentless, coming in around the clock.A photo of Konstantin in the embalming room in PPE, spring 2020.Photo Courtesy Of Ann WallaceIn those four weeks, more than 5,000 people had died in New Jersey; even more had passed in neighboring New York City. The United States was woefully unprepared for a pandemic that the global community knew was brewing in January and February; even after we went into lockdown, our president downplayed its severity. The people in the trenches knew differently. In the beginning, New Jersey law, perhaps optimistically, limited funeral gatherings to 50 people, an extraordinarily high number for small funeral homes. Konstantin and his partner set their limit lower, at 25, to allow for more space, more air, between people. It still seemed risky. A few days later, on March 21, with more than 1,300 recorded COVID cases (and an untold number of unrecorded cases, like my 16-year-old daughter Molly, who became symptomatic on March 9 before testing was readily available) in New Jersey, our governor Phil Murphy shut down all public social gatherings, including funerals, in an effort to slow the spread of the virus. But of course, the virus still spread. And the death count rose.At the funeral home where Konstantin works, just like every hospital or morgue in the New York metropolitan area where we live, they soon had so many death calls that they had no place to put the bodies. The cemeteries had weeks-long waiting lists. The crematories, too. He and his colleagues were in the car for hours each day, picking up the COVID deceased from nursing homes, from apartments and houses, from the packed refrigerated trucks parked outside of hospitals. At the worst, they had more than 20 bodies in their small funeral home that typically handled 160 funerals a year. That April, they took on seven to 10 new funeral cases a day. When they ran out of empty stretchers at the funeral home, Konstantin had gone to the big box hardware store Lowe’s in March to buy folding tables. They laid bodies three to a table in the chapel. They were lucky if they were able to take one or two bodies to the cemetery for burial or the crematory for cremation. Many funeral homes have no refrigeration. If they do, their coolers hold two, maybe three bodies, because no funeral home would ever before have needed to hold a body, unembalmed, for so long. They hoped against hope that the weather would not turn warm.The media was focused on the horror taking place in hospitals, tracking the stories of doctors and nurses working in hospital emergency rooms, separated from their families for days that turned to weeks. Across the Hudson River, New York City residents opened their windows to cheer and ring bells in appreciation for these heroes. I had been in these hospitals as a very sick COVID patient; I had seen the sacrifices, the weary, frightened faces. I could see it over Zoom with my primary care doctor. They were indeed doing heroic work, risking their own lives to save ours. But no one was telling the story of what happened to the bodies in the refrigerated trucks, or to those who died in nursing homes, or at home. Who cared for those who were already gone?When funeral gatherings and family viewings were prohibited at the start of the pandemic, the unsettling labor of funeral workers was pushed far from the public eye. Nobody wanted to think about the person who drove up in a dark van, lifted a COVID victim onto a stretcher, slid the body into the back of their vehicle, and returned to the funeral home to care for — to wash or to embalm, to dress, to place in a casket — the once-living person who was now an infectious corpse. That story needs to be told. The makeshift COVID-19 testing site set up at a fire station in Jersey City in late May 2020.Photo Courtesy Of Ann WallaceEach day, Konstantin woke in an empty apartment — his teenage daughter staying with her grandmother a few blocks away for safety. Me, in my home across town, very, very ill with my daughters. He pulled on a clean black scrubs shirt and the military-grade black cargo pants he had purchased in March when his world shifted. He tucked a bottle of hand sanitizer through the loop on his pants, hooked one of the scarce N95 masks he had cooked in his oven the night before to sanitize it for reuse around his ears, fed his dog and gave her a few pets, and then crossed the street to the funeral home.All day, every day, he handled the bodies of the COVID dead. In those early weeks, when PPE was scarce, funeral directors weren’t given priority access like medical professionals were; they were at the back of the queue for respirators, with the rest of us. And their needs went beyond masks; they needed gloves, full body coveralls and booties to protect themselves from bodily fluids of infectious bodies. Body bags for the deceased. A friend donated three plastic suits to Konstantin. They were too small, and he tore one while putting it on. He was devastated when he realized he had ruined it. It was more valuable than gold. The CDC mandated that anyone who was exposed to a person infected with COVID-19 must quarantine for 14 days. Where did that leave someone like Konstantin, who was exposed every day? Did wearing PPE negate the risk? Konstantin and I had already stayed apart for a month due to my infection. We remained isolated for nearly two more months, until early June. I was still very ill, but, more, once the COVID funeral calls began, Konstantin could have been infected at any given moment and become a risk to others. There was no way to know. Rapid testing was not yet available.During the first wave of pandemic deaths, Konstantin called me another time in distress. He had been moving the body of a man who had died of COVID. The body bag, heavy with liquid pooled at the bottom, had ripped open. Konstantin was sprayed with infectious bodily fluids. Embalmers learn as part of their training to take caution with all bodies, and extra caution with infectious bodies. When the body bag split, Konstantin knew the risks. He waited five days for any possible infection to become detectable and then went to the new testing facility that had opened at a fire station downtown. He stood in line on the sidewalk for an hour or two, slowly inching forward until he reached the front and was swabbed with one of those horrible early tests with a Q-tip so long, it seemed to reach into the recesses of your brain. He waited two more days for his test results. Negative. Thank god.The author spent her 50th birthday on March 28, 2020 sick with COVID at the Jersey City Medical Center.Photo Courtesy Of Ann WallaceI asked friends and family for N95 masks, which they left in my foyer or sent by mail. Konstantin picked them up when he left bags of groceries for my daughters and me outside our door. While other people feared going to the supermarket, Konstantin welcomed the distraction, the near-normalcy of shopping for food, of being able to do something, anything for his mother and daughter, for my daughters and me. He had greater risks to worry about than becoming infected at the store, standing six feet from others. So he asked every few days if we needed anything. I always felt guilty saying yes, hating to ask for anything when his work was so pressing. I know now that providing food for us was important to Konstantin. While I fought for breath, this was one life-sustaining gift he could offer. When I felt well enough, I would walk to the door and smile through the window when he made the drop off. More than once, he had to turn away without smiling back, the tears already rolling down his cheeks. It was easier if he came and went undetected.Each day, on end, Konstantin and his colleagues picked up bodies, and carefully, in full body PPE including respirators that covered their entire faces, prepared them for burial or cremation. The process was silent, invisible. Since families could not see their loved ones, the heart of the care funeral directors provide was stripped away; they became body removal services, and that is what they did all day, hurrying to apartments and nursing homes to remove the deceased as soon as possible, rushing in when hospitals said to get there right away because their morgues and refrigerated trucks were full. In the most horrific cases, they picked up bodies from the floor of the trucks or checked toe tags in the dark, no hospital staff present to supervise or assist. Yet they continued their work, out of sight, with care and respect, until they had nothing left to give. Konstantin and the author at the launch for her most recent poetry collection in March 2026.Mark WyvilleAs spring gave way to summer 2020, Konstantin sloughed his way home each night, crossing the empty street to his house. He entered through the door to the basement, where he stripped naked and put his clothes directly into the washing machine. He then went upstairs to feed his dog, who had waited patiently all day for his return, and to pour himself a large stiff drink so he might numb the horror for a short spell, until early the next morning when it all began again.It is easy, years later, to turn away from the horrors of those early weeks and months of the pandemic, when suffering — of the sick and of those who cared for them in life and in death — occurred in isolation and behind closed doors. It often seems we have collectively forgotten the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic and the price paid by those who gave so much to help the rest of us make our way through. Indeed, we have a president who downplayed the severity of the pandemic and since his return to office has removed many of the guardrails meant to protect us. But more than 1.2 million Americans died from COVID-19, and it is a matter of time before another infectious disease spreads unabated. Many of us carry the scars, literal and metaphoric, of the pandemic within our bodies still.One evening in winter 2025, Konstantin and I were in the car, dressed up and driving to a restaurant for Valentine’s Day. His dog, now elderly and struggling with dementia, was home with her beloved pet sitter. Konstantin’s phone rang. A colleague was on the line, asking for Konstantin’s help picking up a deceased person from a hospital. He asked, “Do you need the body tonight?” The answer was no. I felt my body release the tension I hadn’t realized had taken hold when the call came in. But this time the hospital morgues were not full, and the refrigerated trucks are but a hazy memory for most people. This time, the work could wait until the morning. And so Konstantin and I continued our slow drive across town, on frigid streets now clogged with traffic and other couples, like us, on their way to dinner. This time, together. Ann E. Wallace, PhD, is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Jersey City, New Jersey. As a long-time survivor of ovarian cancer, a woman with multiple sclerosis and one of the nation’s first Long Covid patients, she has lived and written through illness for more than 30 years. She has published and made media appearances regarding COVID for Huffington Post, USA Today, Good Morning, America, NPR and elsewhere and serves on the NIH RECOVER Initiative for Long COVID. Her work is online at www.AnnWallacePhD.com.Do you have a compelling personal story you’d like to see published on HuffPost? Find out what we’re looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.