Urns with virus dead ashes now part of Peru homes

The box with the ashes of María Cochachín, who for 25 years cleaned the offices of the Ministry of Economy of Peru, is next to a window on a table with candles and portraits.

Her daughter Joselyn García lights the candles every night after work and doubts if it was right for her mother to have been cremated after dying from the new coronavirus in a country used for centuries to bury its dead.

Cochachín's wish in life was always to be buried in a white box. But that did not happen because after dying on June 5 from the new coronavirus, she was cremated by authorities.

Now the ashes remain surrounded by photographs in which Cochachín appears with her daughter, who is now 25 years old and was also left alone, without the mother who raised her without anyone's help.

Like Mrs. Cochachín, more than 4,000 Peruvians, 20% of those who died due to the pandemic have been cremated in Peru. Now the marble boxes are mostly in homes, they have returned with the ashes of the dead to the houses where they lived for years.

Funeral homes dedicated to cremations travel the streets of the city delivering ashes. But sometimes they also hand them over at the door of the crematoriums.

The act of delivery is simple. The funeral employee, dressed in a white suit and a mask, gets out of a car and delivers a box of ashes weighing just over one kilogram to the relatives.

The funeral cars that deliver ashes work from morning until dark. On average they deliver 20 boxes per day.

They coordinate by phone with relatives before arriving at a house. Sometimes the relatives of the victims live in such remote areas that they prefer to coordinate with the funeral parlors in a square or on a busier corner of the city.

Some relatives say that cremation is sometimes cheaper than burying, said Gianina Soto, 48, after receiving the ashes of her 74-year-old mother Luz Angeles.

Joe Huamán, Gianina's husband, said that her father's ashes, who also died from COVID-19, are now in the living room of the house. "Every day they talk to him, they share with him," he added.

As of Thursday, Peru had 27,034 deaths from the new coronavirus and more than 567,000 infected. The country's hospitals are collapsing and many sick from the new coronavirus need to be admitted to beds in intensive care units that are in short supply.

Scenes of long lines of relatives buying oxygen in green tanks are seen in various parts of the city. Seeing ambulances and funeral cars pass by also became a common scene in the Peruvian capital.

Peru has the highest death rate per 100,000 inhabitants in the world, surpassed only by Belgium, according to the Johns Hopkins University count.