The priest gave a final benediction. There were no flowers, no embraces. Francesca Steffanoni and her mother hurried away from Bergamo’s main cemetery, their furtive farewell lasting no more than 5 minutes.
Bergamo is the epicenter of the hardest-hit province of Italy’s hardest-hit region, Lombardy, the site of hundreds of coronavirus deaths.
Families here are deprived of a bedside farewell with virus-stricken loved ones, or even a traditional funeral, and the cemetery is so overwhelmed by the number of dead that military trucks transported 65 bodies to a neighboring region for cremation this week.
Steffanoni had taken her mother to watch as the coffin containing an 82-year-old relative — a widower with a heart condition, struck down with