A12 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 22 , 2021
she was done. She just wanted to
get through her final days with-
out stumbling and making some
grieving stranger’s life even hard-
er.
FEMA set up the assistance
line this year after Congress set
aside several billion dollars to
pay for covid funerals. In a m atter
of weeks, the agency hired about
4,000 c ontractors across the
country, turning fast-food serv-
ers, retail workers and Uber driv-
ers, many in their early 20s, into
government representatives and
de facto grief counselors. More
than a million calls came in when
the program opened April 12,
with some people trying dozens
of times until they got through.
Now, with covid cases rising
and snags in the program fueling
a backlog of applications, calls
were surging again. People who
had just lost their loved one that
morning, people who had been
waiting on FEMA for months and
were on the brink of eviction,
people who said they needed the
money to stop a crematorium
from disposing of ashes, or to
retrieve a body from a mass
grave, all of it came to Irene. With
70 pages of scripts and instruc-
tions on her screen, she was the
person advising about what was
possible and what was not for
families across the country who
were dealing in the most intimate
and specific ways with the pan-
demic.
“The most significant respon-
sibility I’d had before this was
making coffee, which if you mess
that up, no one’s life is going to
get ruined,” she said as put on her
headset and set her status to
“available.”
Soon, a call from Tennessee
appeared in her queue.
“This is the FEMA COVID-
Funeral Assistance line. My n ame
is Irene. We are deeply sorry for
your loss. How can I help you
today?” she said, repeating the
red text on her screen in a bright,
singsong voice.
“Good morning or whenever it
is,” said a woman in a soft tone.
“Out of curiosity, where are you
located?”
“We are not authorized to say
where we are, unfortunately,”
Irene said, reading from the
script. “What can I answer for
you?”
“Okay, sorry. I’ve been very
depressed today,” the woman
said. “I cried before I got on the
phone. My husband died in July
- I did the services as cheap
as I could because my husband
got covid, then I got covid and
couldn’t work, so I’m just won-
dering what is going on. I’m sorry
I’m babbling. I’m just very de-
pressed and sad.”
“Of course, of course, take your
time, ma’am,” Irene said. She was
jiggling her foot on the floor
impatiently, but her tone was
smooth and sympathetic. The
guide on her screen said, “Com-
municate warmth. Allow for
emotional expression or crying
without interruption,” and for
FUNERALS FROM A
the next couple of days, that’s
what she was determined to do.A
t first, the call center job
seemed like a stroke of
incredible luck. Irene had
received a message from a re-
cruiter who saw her résumé on a
job site. She remembered t hat the
interview consisted of three
questions. Did she have any call
center experience? Irene an-
swered no. Was she bilingual?
No. Could she start in two weeks?
Irene answered yes, and that
turned out to be enough.
FEMA was working fast. The
agency has historically reim-
bursed funeral expenses when
people die in federally declared
disasters regardless of financial
need, paying for a few hundred
memorials a year. Suddenly, offi-
cials had to figure out how to
expand the program to accom-
modate all the Americans who
had died of covid by that point in
the spring — 500,000 — with no
way to know how much higher
the number would go. “This was
something that was completely
unprecedented,” Deputy Assis-tant Administrator Melissa
Forbes remembered. “We did it
the best we could.”
So far, the program has paid
out $1.5 billion to 226,000 fami-
lies, but beneath the numbers is a
program that has been fraught
from the start. There were so
many elements to figure out.
Lawmakers initially wanted to
reimburse families whose loved
ones had covid-19 symptoms list-
ed on their death certificate, but,
Forbes said, the agency decided
that “to be good stewards of the
federal taxpayer,” the death cer-
tificate needed to list the corona-
virus itself. Officials considered
building a new online applica-
tion system, but determined it
would be quicker to take registra-
tions by phone. That meant
building a huge call center opera-
tion, which meant writing
scripts, sending laptops and
headsets across the country to
turn spare rooms and closets into
FEMA-approved workstations,
and putting together a day of
training to prepare the new hires.
Irene was in the first group of
trainees. She watched on herlaptop as a FEMA worker re-
viewed the five stages of grief and
talked about how to soothe call-
ers “experiencing emotional cri-
sis” given the “current pandemic
environment.” The second half of
the training focused on the dis-
tress these calls might cause
agents. “The work we do is often
times difficult and emotionally
draining,” the trainer said. She
encouraged the group to use deep
breathing, prayers and mantras
to relax, and gave them o ne of
FEMA’s own devising: “Stress is
not necessarily something bad —
it all depends on how you take it.”
That was a Thursday. On Fri-
day morning, Irene started tak-
ing calls. She reminded herself to
sit up straight because the train-
ing had said that posture affects
the tone of your voice. A tracker
at the bottom of her screen was
supposed to count the number of
people on hold, but it only had
space for two digits and blinked
“99+” all day long. She remem-
bered her first callers, and how
nervous and excited she was to
talk to them. A man whose voice
kept cracking as he registered forthe funerals of his mother, wife
and brother. A son who wanted to
know if he could claim his fa-
ther’s death if he had also been
sick with cancer. A woman who
kept her on the line for an hour
said she was fending off loneli-
ness by talking with her hus-
band’s ghost. After that, it all
began to blur together because
there were so many calls coming
in — people wanting to sign up,
people wanting to find out how
soon until they could be done
with FEMA forever, people want-
ing to thank her, people wanting
to yell at her, perhaps knowing
she was not allowed to hang up,
and now eight months later and
with two days left to go, a woman
from Alabama was asking her
why things were taking so long.
“It’s been months and months
and months and I’ve called in
every week,” the woman said.
Irene could hear the exasperation
in her voice, and she kept her eyes
on her script as the woman
launched into a long story about
how she had struggled to figure
out the delay.
Irene saw the problem — anagent had incorrectly marked her
relative as having burial insur-
ance, which would disqualify her
from getting help. It was a mis-
take new hires often made, click-
ing the wrong button when they
heard someone had life insur-
ance. “Let me just go ahead and
fix that,” Irene said.
“Well thank you,” the woman
said.
“Fingers and toes crossed,”
Irene said.
She hung up, wishing all calls
could be that easy, with an actual
solution to offer. The automated
system counted down 30 seconds
for her to collect herself before
the next one, and here it came, a
young woman from South Caro-
lina who had requested reim-
bursement for her mother’s fu-
neral back when wait times were
shorter. Her paperwork was all in
order, but, Irene said, following
the script, “our official time
frame is now more than 90 days
from the date of registration.”
“Okay, because I borrowed
money from people and they’re
asking. They’re here on speaker-
phone,” the woman said, and
began to explain that she was on
disability and had no income, her
mother had worked as a maid
and had no savings, her father
had sold his van to try to finance
the funeral, but it still wasn’t
enough even for a simple grave-
side burial. When relatives heard
about FEMA’s reimbursement
program, they loaned her several
thousand dollars, but now they
were getting impatient. “So do
you know how long? It won’t be
too much longer?” the woman
asked.
Irene paused and adjusted her
blue cat’s-eye glasses. She could
hear men’s voices in the back-
ground. There was no telling
when a worker assigned to check-
ing documents would get around
to this application. But her best
judgment told her to try to be
reassuring. “No, ma’am. I don’t
believe so,” she said. She heard
someone mutter “okay” on the
other end of the line. “Fingers
and toes crossed,” Irene said.
The guide on her screen re-
minded her, “Callers who have
lost loved ones to covid- 19 are
undergoing a great deal of stress”
and Irene knew it from the hurt
and the grief coming through in
each call, but more and more it
seemed to her like some people
were under additional stress be-
cause of the FEMA process itself,
which, despite the agency’s best
efforts, was still a work in prog-
ress, and an uneven one at that:
Poor families that applied for
help were being approved at sig-
nificantly lower rates than rich
ones. Wait times for decisions
kept creeping up. Even the form
that Irene filled out with every
call showed an agency that was
used to dealing with natural dis-
asters, not covid deaths. The
name of the covid-19 victim went
into a field labeled “occupants.”
The place where they died went
under “damaged dwelling.” Con-
tact information for the person
applying went under “damagedAN RONG XU FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
FEMA’s assistance for covid funeralshas hit unprecedented levelsRACHEL WOOLF FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
TOP: Yong Chao Liu walks in Flushing, N.Y., to the nursing home where his father died, most likely of covid-19.
ABOVE: Irene Hild decided to leave her job after eight months at FEMA’s COVID-19 Funeral Assistance call center.