At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had been working as a medicolegal death investigator for three years. I was employed by the county coroner and my role involved going to the scene of a death, taking photos, collecting evidence, and conducting interviews.
Like many other professions, the work environment for medicolegal death investigators changed due to COVID-19. Instead of working from home, we were asked to reuse our surgical masks up to five times before disposing of them, rather than providing us with N95 masks. We were also directed to use minimal gloves when working in the field, which didn’t make much sense.
Although we weren’t saving the lives of the sick, we were intimately involved with human anatomy in ways most people aren’t. We had our hands in mouths and blood. We inserted swabs into noses and, for a period of time, rectal cavities to test deceased individuals for the virus. We even drew blood and vitreous fluid on the scene to assist doctors. COVID-19 remains detectable after death, long after death.
Being a medicolegal death investigator was a challenging yet rewarding career for me. I had left a job as a behavioral therapist for children to work part-time for the coroner in my hometown before eventually moving to a larger city. Many people in my life were confused by my decision, but my grandfather wasn’t surprised at all.
When I was a child and stayed overnight at my grandparents’ house, they would sit me in front of the television, turn on a crime show, and challenge me to solve the case before the reveal. My grandfather, a retired firefighter and EMS, would give me a notepad and pencil and tell me to make a list of clues. I loved solving puzzles and unraveling mysteries. As a death investigator, I got to do just that, peeling back layers upon layers of unknowns.
When people learned about my profession during COVID-19, their response was often, “Wow, you must be really busy.” I can’t recall when exactly my reply changed from, “COVID-19 is a natural cause and doesn’t fall under our jurisdiction” to simply saying, “Yes.” Although our role didn’t involve investigating pandemic-related deaths, it didn’t mean the pandemic didn’t affect us and our work.
We were overworked, understaffed, and woefully unprepared. Our morgue had FEMA cots because there was a shortage of carts to hold the increasing number of bodies. Some of us became ill, and due to budget cuts, overtime was not allowed. Some investigators worked from the beginning of their shift to the end and came in the next day to a pile of reports to write. The pandemic was not only about dealing with a virus but was also a physical, emotional, and psychological plague.
In 2021, my city experienced the highest homicide rate recorded: 205 homicides in a Midwestern college town with a population of 900,000. While it may seem like a small percentage, 0.02%, it felt much larger when I was the one responsible for handling those cases. And this number only accounted for deaths within the city limits; there were many more throughout the county.
The suicide rates in my county rose by 10% from the previous year in 2021. Our office had to create new positions specifically for deaths by suicide and overdose deaths. In 2020, there were 859 overdose deaths, a 48% increase from 2019. This was particularly alarming considering the ongoing opioid epidemic in the Midwest.
We used an online database to track spikes in overdoses, which required at least six overdose deaths within a 24-hour period. There were often multiple spikes in a week, especially when stimulus checks were distributed. We presumed the increase was due to people having extra money to spend on drugs.
These increases led to theories in our office about their correlation with the pandemic. We noticed patterns in our cases with certain days of the week and holidays, so it seemed plausible that the pandemic added to these underlying issues. In 2020, people were anxious, and in 2021, they were desperate. Many lost their jobs, health insurance, access to therapy, or means to get to their opioid treatment centers. People were trapped indoors in stressful situations with loved ones, tolerable company, or abusers. Under these pressures, people might partake in risky behaviors that put their lives in danger.
Before this point, I had no trouble handling the stress that came with my job. People often said, “It takes a certain type of person to do this job,” and it rang true. However, seeing dead bodies was only a small part of what was required of us. We also interacted with grieving families, provided comfort when we could, and allowed them to express their grief. We were strangers entering their homes on the worst day of their lives. They either loved us or hated us, but nobody was happy to see us.
I always managed to handle it all calmly. I approached a scene as a scientist, spoke to families as a therapist, and tried not to think about what I had witnessed once I went home. But during COVID-19, the trauma started seeping out from the neatly packed boxes in my mind. The tofu I didn’t press properly became brain matter in my frying pan. The plastic bag in a drainage ditch during my run transformed into a human foot. My job was everywhere. When the world shut down, my job intensified, and it consumed my life.
After my first shift of the new year in 2021, I began contemplating leaving the field. During that shift, I was the last person to hold a deceased infant before they were taken for examination. I cradled two young sisters while my colleague put them in a double-lined body bag as a COVID precaution. Additionally, I had to place their father’s body on the opposite side of the cooler because I couldn’t bear the thought of him being next to them after what he had done. In just one 10-hour workday, I experienced hate beyond anger, questioned the existence of true evil, and ended the day with a sharp yet dull ache in the base of my spine.
As soon as I clocked out, I sat in my car and sobbed until I could regain control of my breathing. It was 8 a.m., the winter air was crisp, and my tears tasted bitter. Those tears stemmed from a job that required me to enter strangers’ homes and clean up the pain I didn’t cause. Was I a death investigator or a custodian of trauma? I could no longer differentiate between the two.
To help alleviate the stress experienced by me and my coworkers, our office brought in a therapy dog for us to interact with every few weeks after the shutdown ended. I often found solace in sitting on the floor of my supervisor’s office, petting the therapy dog, and discussing the challenges we faced in our line of work. It was a small but meaningful gesture that reminded us we weren’t alone in our struggles.