When the owner of an art framing company decided to serve as a morgue worker in New York City, he told a local radio station he couldn't have imagined what the job would really mean in the epicenter of a deadly pandemic. "I said yes," Erik Frampton told WNYC radio, "without knowing why I was doing it, without knowing if I was at risk, without knowing what the cost would be." Frampton gave a detailed account of his experiences in the radio interview and was subsequently fired, he said in a Facebook post Saturday.
“The morgue inside the hospital is completely filled with bodies on stretchers, also filling the room outside the refrigerators and into the hallways, taking up probably valuable beds,” Frampton told WNYC. He worked with about seven other men outside the hospital from one of two 20-ton, air-conditioned trailers, each able to hold about 110 bodies, he said. Similar sites were set up in the parking lots of hospitals throughout the city, WNYC reported.
Frampton told the radio station he took on the work because his art business temporarily closed due to response to the pandemic, but he said after being fired he was “heartbroken.” “It will take me some time to come down from the adrenaline of being there. Of the monumental ask. Knowing 8 or 12 or 30 more bodies may have amassed,” Frampton said on Facebook. He said the experienced transformed him. “I did not know I would be loved on the job by men working in their own community. But I could not hold on to my influence and my principles at the same time,” he said in the post. “So as the inventory of the unclaimed dead steadily grew, as their proportion to the claimed steadily increased, as the number of days on the oldest corpses fought for stature along with the fresh, the asks of my guys and me became steadily more risky, more illegal, and more untenable.”
Frampton said in his WNYC interview that when hospitals ran out of body bags, heavy black ones were replaced with thin white ones that ripped frequently. "Some are barely in the bags because they have ripped so many times,” Frampton told WNYC. He described index fingers with “Covidean” written on them and remains still with tubes and ventilator connections in them, in a Gothamist article.
When a shelf collapsed in one trailer, six bodies were piled on top of each other, Frampton described. When authorities failed to initially block the view of the trucks, children in the hospital’s psych ward could likely see, he added. “Can you find the zipper? Is that the head or the feet," Frampton could be heard asking during one shift in the dark work environment.
Frampton told WNYC the work was also scary even though they wore two layers of body aprons, two layered masks, and hospital-grade gloves. He was paid $75 an hour. “They write a check for your first day in case you don't come back," he said. Frampton, however, did come back, and on his third day on the job, he got a pay raise to $100 an hour. “I think I’m scared of dying,” he told the radio station. “I don’t want to die.” He said he no longer kisses or touches his husband of 25 years. "But we sleep in the same bed, so it's all just farce," Frampton said. His brother-in-law was hospitalized with COVID-19, but he is improving. “This morning around dawn, on Easter Sunday, my brother in law was able to blink his eyes in response to questions,” Frampton said in another Facebook post. “He will be back with us soon. This feels as good as any Easter ever has.”
He cried when he was asked about the family of the deceased he handled. "Who's calling about them? What person could not visit them when they were, you know, in isolation before they had to go on respirator and they couldn't talk anymore? Who wants to know where that person is right now," he asked in the WNYC interview. "I don't have any mournfulness for the vessel that I'm handling. I guess if I did, I wouldn't be able to do this, but I do constantly think of the people who want to know where is their person."
He said he can assure them their person is “safe, cold, respected.” “I think of a Jennifer, I think of Moyshe, I think of a Santiago, I think of a Melissa, I think of a Bessey and a Betty, I think of an Hernan,” Frampton told WNYC. “I can't stop thinking of them.”