In towns and cities around the country, funeral homes, cemeteries and mortuaries were under unprecedented stress these past two years as an industry designed to accommodate a predictable number of deaths faced the challenges of caring for many more.

For the time being, Messinger Fountain Hills Mortuary is back to “normal” after being inundated by the pandemic.

When Allan Ruby began working as manager and funeral director at Messinger Mortuary seven years ago, approximately 225 deaths were processed in a single year. In 2020, that number increased to 305, and in 2021, a total of 384 remains were stored, buried or cremated, marking the highest number in the history of Messinger Fountain Hills Mortuary.

“I would go home around 7 p.m., eat some dinner, and then come back to work to get ready for a viewing the next morning,” Ruby said.

In what would typically be the workload for a single year, Ruby and his staff at Messinger packed 15 months of work into a span of 12 months.

With unpredictable spikes in COVID deaths, it’s unclear what 2022 will hold for Messinger Mortuary. However, by comparison, January 2021 saw 47 remains versus 29 in January 2022.

“COVID really put a damper on things, but it has calmed down,” Ruby said, who has seen more West Nile Virus than COVID-related deaths in recent months.

Over the last two years, the uptick in COVID-related deaths was followed by increased demand for urns, coffins and caskets, creating a global supply shortage that slowed their delivery to mortuaries and funeral homes like Messinger. And with overcrowding occurring further up the chain, hospitals were looking to funeral directors like Ruby for help.

“The medical examiners called us and said, ‘Hey, do you guys have any room out there?’” Ruby said. With only so much space in his mortuary cooler, Ruby purchased an additional rack to shelve more remains.

Ruby recalls families who could not properly say goodbye to their loved ones due to travel restrictions. He spoke of one family of the deceased living in Canada that was heartbroken because they were prohibited from traveling across borders to attend a funeral. Another family living in New York made the difficult choice to stay home altogether due to prolonged quarantine periods.

“Some families had to say, ‘you know what, go ahead and bury mom or dad and we’ll come back to the grave site when we get a chance to get out there,’” Ruby said. “It was really awful for families.”

Aside from the challenging work he and his staff put in to meet the high demand for funeral-related services, Ruby credits the foresight of Paul and Cora Messinger in owning their own cemetery and crematory. Because of this, Messinger was able to complete cremations within three to four days while other mortuaries were waiting two to three weeks to fulfill cremation requests.

At the Chamber Gala last year, Ruby and Messinger Mortuary were honored by the Chamber with the Customer Service of the Year award. Ruby is quick to credit his wife, Lynn, who supported him and his assistant, Denise Schlum, who spent many nights working late to help with the influx of service requests.

“I couldn’t have done it without [them],” said Ruby. “[They] really helped a lot.”

Throughout the last two grueling years, Ruby is proud that he never turned down a family that called for help.

While it may be too early to tell what kind of year Messinger Mortuary will have, Ruby is keeping sensible expectations about the future.

“With all the variants of COVID, it’s going to be around here for a while,” Ruby said. “We still need to protect ourselves and our families.”