'I just ask God to help me': Texas funeral home crushed by death as US COVID toll nears 500,000

By Callaghan O'Hare and Maria Caspani HOUSTON (Reuters) - Sunday is traditionally a quiet day for Chuck Pryor's Houston funeral home, but on this Sunday in February, almost a year after the global pandemic reached Texas, the phone was still ringing. Pryor took the call: COVID-19 had taken yet another American life -- pushing the nation's death toll closer to the half-million mark -- and another grieving family required the services of the exhausted funeral director and his staff. "It's just mentally taxing," Pryor, 59, who runs a small funeral home business with his wife Almika, told Reuters e...