On a gray January morning, Santos Torres III, a thirty-year-old courier for Bergen Funeral Service, in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, caught a ride to the French consulate in Manhattan. Normally Torres takes a train into New York, where he spends the day traversing the city carrying a messenger bag filled with death certificates, cash for notary and consular fees, letters from doctors, and other documents detailing the transportation and burial arrangements for the recently deceased. That morning, however, his ride was Stan Twaruszka, a driver who transports bodies for the funeral home. They pulled up to the curb in a Honda Odyssey—the company’s preferred vehicle, for its discreetness—carrying the casket of a twenty-three-year-old man named Enzo Corigliano, who had died in mid-December.
The wooden casket sat inside a T.S.A.-approved shipping box, labelled with the deceased’s name and the contact information for a funerary transportation service in New Caledonia, where Enzo was from. The casket was scheduled to fly to Paris out of John F. Kennedy International Airport the following day, and, later, from Paris to Nouméa, the capital of the French archipelago in the South Pacific.
A French consular official, a lanky woman dressed in jeans, met Torres at the curb. They exchanged collegial nods. In the year that he’s worked as a courier, Torres has become familiar with a particular cast of characters—diplomats like the French official, as well as consulate security guards and employees of funeral homes who frequent the same buildings. “You’re here again,” the other workers often say to him.
Twaruszka opened the minivan’s trunk and removed the shipping-container lid to reveal a mahogany-colored casket. The consulate is responsible for sealing caskets permanently before they ship. As cars sped down Fifth Avenue, the consular official held a blowtorch, lit a flame, and drew circles of burgundy wax on the wood, then stamped it with the official seal of the French republic. She authorizes this kind of shipment about once a month.
Sending bodies across borders is a complex process, requiring a combination of notarizations, translated apostilles, health-department authorizations, burial permits, letters that certify bodies do not carry infectious diseases, and other official sign-offs. Each country is unique in its practices: Egypt, for example, stipulates that funeral homes must bring bodies to the consulate so that officials can open the casket to verify the deceased’s identity; Italy requires authorization from officials in the town where the deceased will be buried. Bergen Funeral Service, which is one of a handful of funeral companies that specialize in the delicate business of repatriating bodies, ships the remains of up to two thousand humans each year, including ashes. About eight hundred of those are international cases.
What was already a fraught process has become even more convoluted in the COVID-19 era. Bureaucratic holdups and infrequent international flights have resulted in weeks- and months-long delays. At the beginning of the pandemic, countries shut down airports and refused overseas shipments of corpses—even of people who had not died of the virus. Even when countries reopened their borders, some officials remained hesitant to accept bodies from the United States, a COVID-19 hot spot. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintains that there is little risk of coronavirus transmission from dead bodies, Torres told me that one consulate asked him to obtain a letter from a doctor that explicitly stated the body was COVID-free.
When the sealed casket was ready to fly, Torres took a photo of the shipping box to send to his bosses at the funeral home, then waved goodbye to Twaruszka and headed to the subway to finish delivering documents. Twaruszka drove the casket to the funeral home’s Queens location, where employees would take it to the airport. Previously, there were daily flights between Paris and Nouméa; because of the pandemic the route was only flown weekly. While waiting in Paris, Enzo’s casket would be held in airport storage with other cargo, like mail and foodstuffs. His burial was scheduled for January 20th, five weeks after he died.
Late on the evening of December 12th, Jennifer Corigliano heard the doorbell ring at her house in La Flèche, France. It was a police officer who had come to notify Jennifer that her oldest son, Enzo, a student at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York, had died by suicide. After the officer left, Jennifer noticed that the clock read 23:23, which made her pause. She and Enzo used to send each other messages when something significant happened at a mirror hour—like 12:12 or 20:20—one of many jokes and superstitions that they shared.
Jennifer called her husband, Grégory, who still lived in Nouméa, and asked him to travel with her to New York. Then she got in her car to break the news to her younger son, who lived in a town seven hours south. “It was too hard for me to call my little son to tell him his brother passed away,” she recalled, but she also couldn’t bear to sit alone with her grief. As she drove through the night, Jennifer mapped out her next steps. She had to be with Enzo, and she had to bring him back to Nouméa. “The only thing in my mind was, I need to go see him,” she said. “I need to tell him I’m here. I need to touch him.”
A few days later, Jennifer and Grégory’s request to travel to the U.S. was approved. Once in New York, seeing for the first time the vast, forested region where Enzo had studied for nearly two years, they checked into a hotel to isolate for five days. The couple, in the process of filing for divorce but still amiable, spent anguished days eating French fries and ordering room service. When they were released from quarantine, on Christmas Eve, they were finally able to see Enzo’s body, laid in a casket at a Canton funeral home. “It was like when you don’t see somebody and then you see him again for the first time,” Jennifer told me. “I felt like that. I haven’t seen my son for a long time, and I see him again.” Over the next few days, she and Grégory closed Enzo’s bank account and cleaned out his dorm room—“a real, messy boy room,” Jennifer told me. She ordered a mahogany casket in honor of her son’s school colors, scarlet and brown.
Enzo, an internationally ranked squash player who competed for the French junior national team as a teen-ager, had moved to Canton to play at the American collegiate level. He was a “magician” on the court, said Grégory, a coach who, otherwise demure when speaking with me, lit up when the conversation turned to his son’s athletic abilities. A “showman,” Jennifer added. He was slender and muscular, with highlighted hair that tapered near his neck and a constellation of piercings in his ears. His playing style was like that of a dancer; he was graceful even when lunging across the court. There was no question his parents would return his body to Nouméa, where he was a local hero.
But how they’d transport his body nearly nine thousand miles during a pandemic was less clear. The funeral home that had collected Enzo’s body was unable to ship it internationally, so its director asked Matthew Connors, of Bergen Funeral Service, to get the casket to Nouméa. Jennifer and Grégory returned to New Caledonia, and a funeral-home employee drove the casket six hours south to Hasbrouck Heights, where the body was stored with a handful of others, some of which had been sitting there for weeks. Connors and his colleagues at the funeral home have an uncommon level of experience working with grieving families abroad; in the past, the company handled cases involving American college students who died during semesters away, immigrants who wanted to be buried in their home countries, car crashes, drownings, medical procedures gone wrong—losses made even more difficult for their distance.
In a way, the pandemic has made all deaths distant. At a time when mourning rituals are completely upended, and many spend their final days isolated from family, it’s as though everyone—even those close to home—is dying in a foreign country. When my own grandfather died, of COVID-19, in a Dallas-area nursing home last July, the local funeral director offered to ship his ashes to my parents’ doorstep, in Southern California, through the United States Postal Service. He had already suffered the indignity of a COVID death—my mother and I, unable to enter his facility, had watched him gasp for air from a window—and we couldn’t bear for his remains to be dropped off by the mailman like a package. Instead, I waited eleven days in Texas until he was cremated, spending one muggy night camping and the others at a friend’s house in Houston. When my grandfather’s ashes were ready, I returned to Dallas to pick them up, strapped his urn into the passenger seat, and drove more than a thousand miles home.
Back in California, I read stories of families around the world who, like mine, agonized over how to dignify their own deceased during lockdown. Months later, when I saw Enzo’s casket at the consulate in Manhattan, I wanted to learn how his family was coping with such a painful task. Talking to Jennifer, I recognized something in the way she spoke about the love and responsibility bound up in bringing her son home. She sounded like my mother, and like me.
For a time last spring, Bergen Funeral Service had to stop shipping remains overseas altogether. Inundated with bodies, the funeral home didn’t have the space to store cadavers for long periods of time. “A lot of families chose to have cremation, a lot of them chose to have a local burial here instead,” Connors, the funeral-home director who oversees the company’s transportation of remains, said. “There was nothing they could really do.”
Connors invited me to his family’s Hasbrouck Heights funeral home, a two-story house across from a Catholic school in a suburban neighborhood about twelve miles west of Manhattan. Connors, a third-generation funeral worker, spent childhood afternoons in the building, and eventually started working there as a young adult, delivering bodies and documents for shipments.
The company was founded in 1966, when Connors’s grandfather, Richard Nimmo, converted his family’s house—around the block from the current location—into a funeral business. It started out modestly: Nimmo was a driver and embalmer, picking up bodies around the New Jersey area in a station wagon, and his children helped him, cleaning cars and vacuuming the funeral facilities. In the nineteen-eighties, the industry, once local, expanded to adapt to an increasingly transient American populace. Bergen Funeral Service began courting travel agencies, offering to bring bodies home if their clients died abroad, and later began working directly with the families of the deceased.
The title of funeral-home director does not readily conjure a person like Connors, a thirty-two-year-old former college athlete with messy hair and a boyish manner. His laidback attitude is both welcome in this line of work and puzzling given the acute demand for his services. When I visited the funeral home, Connors had spent the previous night on call for body pickups, taking calls in his bathroom until the early-morning hours, but the lack of sleep didn’t seem to faze him. Instead, he was upbeat and chatty as we descended to the basement, where several masked morticians were making incisions into papery skin and draining blood from dead bodies. Upstairs, he showed me a room at the side of the house that held caskets destined for Italy, El Salvador, and Spain. Once the paperwork is finished and a flight is booked, Bergen’s drivers must bring the casket to the airport’s cargo facility, where it is weighed and priced accordingly. “I hate to say that, but technically they are cargo,” Connors said with a shrug. “It goes in the cargo bay, next to whatever else they are flying. Luggage, fruits, and vegetables, even.”
In another room, Abraham Zorrilla, the company’s assistant shipping coördinator at the time, scrolled through notes on past and present cases. “Called DR to fax over COVID letter on Monday.” “Overnight to Nigerian consulate on Tuesday.” “Still waiting for cemetery approval.” Zorrilla rattled off the destination countries for cases he was overseeing that week: New Caledonia, Mexico, Poland, Albania, Guatemala. “I got somebody from Honduras as well that I just got death certificates for,” Zorrilla said. He sighed. “The problem with them is that one of the airports has been shut down for the pandemic, and another one just went through a storm.”
This line of work, Connors told me with no small amount of pride, requires keeping abreast of current events. Which countries ban flights from certain destinations? Where might war or civil conflict make transportation difficult? While recounting the precise moves required to move bodies across borders, Connors is animated, like a coach recalling a winning play. Because there are no commercial flights between the U.S. and Syria, Connors has had to fly bodies into Lebanon and arrange for drivers to take them across the border. Pulling up Google Maps on a desktop computer, he dragged his mouse around a pixelated Central Pacific, searching for a thin, crescent-shaped strip of land called Kwajalein Island, where he had once arranged to pick up a body. “You don’t even know these places exist,” he said. “But people die there.”
Every death leaves behind work for the living. When Jennifer and I spoke, she described the arduous process of bringing Enzo’s body home as a final gesture of devotion to him. “His first pride was to be a New Caledonian guy,” she said. But it was clear that these last acts of care were foundational to her sense of self, too. She had always cleaned up after Enzo when he moved out of a dorm or apartment, sometimes painting over damage on the walls. Packing up his room and closing his accounts were practically second nature to her. “It’s because he’s dead that it’s hard,” she said.
The work of funeral-home employees, on the other hand, is carried out with a certain level of emotional remove. Connors said he tries not to dwell on the particulars of each case. His job is to do what families themselves cannot alone, and to provide a source of solace. “When they call me, it’s the worst day of their life,” he said. “You need to be able to, day in and day out, manage that and really help people.”
For Torres, Bergen’s courier, repatriating bodies is a day job. He used to produce music full time under the moniker Monoverse, travelling to festivals across Europe and d.j.’ing at New York clubs, but during the pandemic he’s seen most of his regular gigs disappear. Like others at the funeral home, he tends to distance himself from each case. Before the French consular official had mentioned the cause of death the morning of the casket sealing in Manhattan, Torres had known little about Enzo—only his name and age. “I do wonder what goes on sometimes,” he told me. But the work has not made him sentimental about death. “I said to my brother, ‘Put me in the ground wherever I kick it,’ ” Torres said. “ ‘Just dig a hole there for me.’ ”
Twenty-nine days after Jennifer received news of her son’s death, the casket arrived in Nouméa. To complete the last leg of Enzo’s long journey, Jennifer and Grégory enlisted the help of Fabian Dinh, a family friend and member of Nouméa’s police force who, in addition to his regular work inspecting buildings’ fire-safety compliance, also deals with funeral matters. On the night of January 10th, Dinh said, a funeral-services company picked up the casket at the Tontouta airport and drove it to the mortuary.
The morning of Enzo’s burial, January 20th, was muggy and tempestuous, midway through New Caledonia’s rainy season. A crowd of several hundred people gathered inside an auditorium atop a lush hill, while about three hundred from around the globe watched the funeral on Facebook Live. In that small corner of the world, where, at the time, the coronavirus was not spreading and residents were allowed to gather unmasked, the pandemic was a distant reality. Jennifer, dressed in black, gently touched the casket, draped with a flag that she had retrieved from Enzo’s dorm room.
After a brief service, a group of men loaded Enzo’s casket into the back of a van. Jennifer followed the van down the hill, a long procession of mourners trailing behind with umbrellas to protect against the rain. At the grave site, she straightened the soaked flag, wiped rainwater from the casket, and laid down a single flower next to an arrangement of butterfly palm fronds and red-orange anthuriums. Grégory bowed his head to the wood. One by one, mourners placed daffodils on the casket, hundreds of yellow petals and green stalks growing to a heap. After the mourners dispersed, Grégory pointed to the misty sky. His son, finally buried after a long journey home, was no longer bound to the earth. He was there, Grégory said quietly, his eyes glancing upward.
