Tik Root | TIME | Video: Newsy
On April 29, Stephen Kemp arrived at his office just outside Detroit to a perplexing silence. Since COVID-19 hit the city, the phones at his funeral home had been ringing nonstop. Now, nothing.
Kemp’s wife and colleague, Jacquie, soon popped into his office with an explanation: Comcast was down. No phones, no Internet. The outage lasted until early afternoon—a stretch in which the home put on two funeral services and received one more body. When the deceptive calm finally broke, the bad news began pouring in at the torrential pace that had become the Kemps’ new normal.
The most pressing problem was the local crematory, which had stopped taking bodies for the second time in less than a week. “Closed until Monday,” Kemp explained, leaving a voicemail as he exasperatedly called around in search of a solution—to little avail. All the other nearby crematories were full too. “We’re making it up as we go.”