That’s the image she wants to portray, Gee said, “that I will stand up for my community.” “Why do I have to remain neutral because of my position? Why should I have to remain neutral about racism when we all know it exists?” she said. While she describes herself as a “behind-the-scenes” person who has felt the need to stay neutral at times given her work, the events of this year pushed her to speak up. Gee is on the front lines of death, a perspective she thinks is missing from the conversations surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. “There’s no reason why any family should have to suffer because someone decided their life was more important than another’s,” she said. She said she ran out of room on the hearse before she ran out of names.
Gee, who is biracial, is still haunted by the names - the well publicized like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and those lesser known such as 7-year-old Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones, whom police mistakenly shot and killed during a raid in Detroit in 2010, and 93-year-old Pearlie Golden, who was shot by a police officer outside her Texas home. It’s very easy to take on other people’s trauma.” “Every name on the hearse I looked up,” Gee said. Months later, Gee was still driving a hearse, but this time bearing the names of Black victims of police brutality to local racial justice demonstrations. I’ve seen firsthand the numbers you see on the news.” I’ve seen firsthand what that body count looks like. “If you don’t agree with (face) masks, you’re talking to the wrong person. “It was scary,” Gee said during a recent phone interview. Gee, funeral director at Lester Gee Funeral Home in New London, volunteered to transport bodies from New York to the funeral home’s crematory in Connecticut. The death toll in New York City from the coronavirus pandemic was overwhelming funeral homes and morgues where bodies were piling up. New York funeral homes made pleas to their counterparts in neighboring states for help. In the spring, Lauren Gee was making regular trips back and forth between Connecticut and New York transporting the dead as the director of her family's funeral home.
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