By this time tomorrow, 2020 will be no more. Congratulations, you made it! No joke, you should feel a sense of pride and accomplishment for enduring a global pandemic, economic uncertainty and a racial reckoning that harkened back to the 1960s.
You dealt with the loneliness that comes from doing the right thing. You were separated from your families on holidays, you celebrated birthdays over Zoom. Some of us had to FaceTime family from hospital beds. You just wanted a hug from a loved one. You also survived the
But while this year might be coming to a close, the COVID-19 pandemic is nowhere near over. It might be tempting to think that it is, given the good news on the vaccines, but the reality is that December was
It wasn’t yet noon and Magda Maldonado had already overseen her second funeral of the day.
The 58-year-old director at Continental Funeral Home in East L.A. had another service scheduled in four hours, but for a moment she sat down and closed her eyes. She thought about her grieving employees and how, in less than a week, four of them had lost loved ones to COVID-19.
“I don’t have words,” she said, holding back tears.
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Seven minutes from the funeral home, in a storefront with signs boasting specials for quinceañeras and weddings, Elizabeth Garibay arranged rose buds and baby’s breath into funeral bouquets at J&I Florist some of the only orders that haven’t dwindled during the pandemic.