Andre Dawson is seeing the effects of the coronavirus pandemic from a vantage point many sports fans would not expect of a Baseball Hall of Famer and former National League MVP.
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Andre Dawson is seeing the effects of the coronavirus pandemic from a vantage point many sports fans would not expect of a Baseball Hall of Famer and former National League MVP.
The longtime star for the Montreal Expos and Chicago Cubs has spent the past dozen years as a mortician.
While running his own funeral parlor, Dawson has recently had to shorten services at his facility’s chapel and limit them to no more than 10 people.
„It’s very sad,“ he said Thursday to the Associated Press. „It’s very sad. Because people mourn and grieve differently, and they’re not getting through that process as they would under normal circumstances.
„You see a lot of hurt and pain.“
Dawson,65, has owned and operated the Paradise Memorial Funeral Home in his hometown of Miami, since 2008. Having retired as a baseball player in 1996, he joined a group of investors his brother organized a few years later to buy a different funeral home, then took an even bigger step into the business.
Dawson did not expect to actually run Paradise Memorial, but „that role sort of fell into my lap,“ he told AARP last year. With the same dedication to his craft that enabled a 21-year major league career, Dawson „threw myself into it, body and soul,“ despite the unlikely nature of his new line of work.
„Growing up I could have never envisioned this,“ he told the AP. „I was actually afraid of the dead when I was a kid.
