Funeral director Mark Cournoyer of Jaffrey is uniquely prepared for any possible surge of COVID-19-related deaths in the region. Cournoyer, who owns and operates Cournoyer Funeral Home in Jaffrey, is one of the only remaining funeral directors in the state who has served on a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, traveling the country to provide mortuary services at mass casualty incidents.
“My experience has helped me always stay more prepared than most,” Cournoyer said in a recent interview at the funeral home. “I’ve always got a couple of months extra embalming fluid, a hundred extra body bags on hand.”
Cournoyer’s retired from DMORT service now, but his time there in the early 2000s saw him deployed to some of the deadliest incidents in recent history, such as the Providence, Rhode Island nightclub fire of 2003 which killed 100 people, and in 2005, Hurricane Katrina.
Cournoyer was deployed to the Mississippi side of the river, set up in a FEMA camp to assist after the devastating hurricane swept through Mississippi and neighboring Louisiana. At least 1,417 people died as a result of Hurricane Katrina; at Cournoyer’s camp, he and the team processed 158 of those bodies, working to positively identify as many as possible. The hurricane’s sea-level epicenter added an extra wrinkle to their work, as coastal flooding led to scores of previously buried bodies being unearthed, which Cournoyer worked to identify as well. As a funeral director, he had no experience running an X-ray machine, but that’s what DMORT needed, so he took it on, scanning bodies for any items like surgical pins that could help reveal their identities.
“You’ve got to be flexible,” Cournoyer said. “You’ve got to be able to fill in where help is needed. That’s always been my viewpoint in doing things here, if things get hectic, you can adapt.”
On a rainy early April morning, Cournoyer and son Garrett helped unload a shipment of 100 cremation trays at the funeral home, simple wooden conveyances akin to a stretcher onto which bodies are placed for transport into a crematorium. Cournoyer said he’d probably use that many in a year, but with the potential of an outbreak of COVID-19 fatalities, he thought he might as well be ready.
“I think it’s crazy not to be prepared, that’s the good Eagle Scout in me,” Cournoyer said. “I would rather prepare and not need something than need toilet paper and not be able to get it, or need any equipment that we use here and not be able to get it.”
Cournoyer said he’s seen the recent footage of overwhelmed New York City hospital workers forklifting pallets of bodies onto refrigerated trucks as the sheer number of fatalities dwarfs the capacity of funeral homes, morgues and crematoriums (as of Monday, over 10,000 people had died in New York City due to the coronavirus). It’s a scene he doesn’t want to see repeated here, and he’s taken steps to prevent that type of unceremonious treatment of the dead here, long before coronavirus was a household word.
“I always had this design in my head for an operation here if there was a surge here, from a plane crash or something like that,” Cournoyer said. In a worst-case scenario, he said, the funeral home’s garage would be converted to a satellite mortuary, where bodies could be processed out of the public eye regardless of volume. “It’s been part of discussions and reviews for us every few years since the Avian Flu, years ago. But it’s never gotten to this point, certainly. There have been planning and discussions in the past that we can lean on now, because in some aspects, we have rehearsed this.”
Whether New Hampshire stays relatively unscathed or gets hit hard remains to be seen. But either way, Cournoyer said he feels for the mortuary workers dealing with increasing casualties. No matter how much you’ve seen, he said, there’s no desensitization.
“You try to get back to your routine,” Cournoyer said. “You try to get back to your family. It’s hard, and that’s going to be everyone with this event. “