These are the heartbreaking belongings that COVID-19 victims left behind

Rafael Eli, 68, stopped breathing in the early hours of April 16 after having spent 18 days on a ventilator at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan.

Every day, his sister Myriam Eli, who lives in Florida, had called Mount Sinai to inquire about her brother, who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 after having been hospitalised in March.

After his death, Eli called the hospital several times to inquire about the whereabouts of her brother’s belongings.

“They couldn’t find them for a while,” Eli, 66, said.

Across New York, workers in patient services at hospitals have had to figure out what to do with the thousands of cellphones, chargers, walkers, canes, hearing aids, dentures, glasses, clothing, shoes, wallets, Bibles and jewellery, among other items, that have been left behind by patients who have died after contracting COVID-19.

One hospital had so many of these items in April that the staff stored them in a room that had been previously used to keep the belongings of patients scheduled for surgery.

By early May, another hospital, St Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, stored about 140 unclaimed items — some kept in bags used for biohazard material — in a room adjacent to its morgue.

“There was no room for neither the deceased nor the property,” said Demetrius Long, 60, director of security at St Barnabas, who oversaw the hospital’s coronavirus fatality management plan.

Many items have remained unclaimed, in many cases because hospital officials have been unable to locate the next of kin. In turn, they have become a symbolic reminder of the toll wrought by a pandemic that has killed more than 20,000 New Yorkers.

When the number of casualties started rising in mid-April, the Bureau of Funeral Directing in the New York City Health Department and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner issued guidelines outlining the best practices for health care facilities to safely manage the belongings of patients who died of COVID-19.

To deal with the surge of items, many hospitals quickly adjusted their property management services.

Joe Schramm helps to clean out the apartment of his friend, Rafael Eli, in New York on Jun 23, 2020. Eli died of COVID-19 in April. Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

At St. Barnabas, a deceased person’s items no longer accompanied them to the hospital’s morgue. Instead, the items were stored in the morgue’s viewing room, where a team of three hospital workers would list them in a spreadsheet, said Long, the hospital’s security director.

Several hospitals, including St. Barnabas and NYU Langone-Tisch Hospital in Manhattan, extended their normal 30-day policy for family or friends to retrieve items.

Hospital staff often spent days trying to locate next of kin.

Desiree Conway, a patient representative with Mount Sinai who began her job in January and was still training when the pandemic hit, said her team was making so many phone calls during the city’s death surge that the department had to extend its weekday hours and remain open during the weekend.

“The job became, I would say, much bigger than I would have expected,” Conway, 25, said.

SUNY Downstate Medical Centre faced challenges in tracking down patients’ friends or relatives. Often, patients arrived at the hospital in an ambulance and with no personal documentation or information about their next of kin, said Dawn Skeete-Walker, associate vice president of communications and marketing.

“Sometimes we had very limited info,” Skeete-Walker said.

Once the relatives were found, scheduling appointments for families to retrieve their loved ones’ belongings also posed a challenge. Many, like Eli, were not allowed to visit the hospital and did not want to set foot there because of fears of contracting the virus, several health care workers at different hospitals said. Others, still mourning, were not ready to collect items left behind by loved ones.

At one of the hardest-hit facilities, Queens Hospital, a member of NYC Health + Hospitals, the city’s public hospital network, the emergency management staff met relatives of the deceased outside for safety reasons, said Marzya Sdrewski, who oversees the Office of Property. A package containing relatives’ belongings also included handling instructions, a face mask, gloves and hand sanitiser.

But for the workers, the effort went beyond sorting through thousands of bags, placing hundreds of phone calls and scheduling the deliveries or pickups. They understood that items carried an emotional value.

“That was the last thing they were wearing before they went into the hospital,” said Jo-Ann Delgado, supervisor of patient relations at NYU Langone-Tisch Hospital.

A man whose mother died at Queens Hospital rushed to pick up her jacket, which contained a treasured locket in its sleeve.

A man who lost his father at NYU Langone-Tisch Hospital was elated when a worker told him they would mail him his father’s tefillin, a pair of cubic black leather boxes with leather straps that go around the arm that Jewish adults, especially Orthodox men, use during morning prayer.

A woman in a nursing home, who did not have the opportunity to say goodbye to her mother before she died at St Barnabas, asked the hospital’s security department to mail her a jacket, a purse and other clothing her mother had left behind.

“She said that was the last thing that her mother had worn,” James Andino, associate director of security and morgue manager at St Barnabas, said of the jacket.

About a week after Eli last called the hospital to track her brother’s items, she got a call from a patient representative who said Rafael Eli’s belongings had been located. Myriam Eli, who was unable to travel to New York from Florida, authorised Joe Schramm, her brother’s best friend and business partner who lives in Long Island, to collect them.

A photo provided by Joe Schramm shows him at right with his friend Rafael Eli in Northport, NY, on Jul 4, 2019. Eli died of COVID-19 in April. Joe Schramm via The New York Times

Schramm had been one of the people Rafael Eli called March 29, hours before being put on a ventilator, to tell him that doctors said he was likely to die from the virus; going on a ventilator was his final chance. He was calling to say farewell.

After several calls trying to schedule a time to pick up his friend’s belongings, Schramm was told by a member of the hospital’s security team that they could not locate the items.

With so many deaths, keeping track of the patients’ belongings as they were transferred between units became very difficult, said Conway, the patient representative at Mount Sinai.

But eventually the hospital found the items.

On an afternoon in May, a courier, wearing a mask and gloves, arrived at Schramm’s house, offered his condolences and carefully placed the box on the driveway.

“I was emotionally affected in a way that I did not expect,” Schramm, 66, said.

The courier instructed him to wait seven days to open the large bag of items and to do so outside his house.

On a sunny afternoon, Schramm opened the bag. Inside, he found his best friend’s clothes, a pair of sneakers, an Adidas backpack, about a week’s worth of kidney medication, two books (a copy of “The Art of Spiritual Healing” by Joel Goldsmith and “House of Gold” by Natasha Solomons), an uncharged cellphone, a navy blue toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. On page 46 of Goldsmith’s book, Eli had circled this sentence: “Let God fill your mind.”

Inside another small plastic bag, Schramm found Eli’s credit cards, keys, an unused ticket for “72 Miles to Go” at the Roundabout Theatre, his driver’s license and $63 in cash. He also found cuff links inside a fanny pack.

Retrieving his best friend’s belongings was the last and only bit of Eli that Schramm could keep, he said.

He plans to keep a sweatshirt and the phone and will wear the cuff links. Some other items, including the driver’s license and the ticket, are sitting in a drawer.

“I just wanted to have a little touch of what he had at the very end,” Schramm said. “It was the only thing I could hang onto.”

© 2020 New York Times News Service