Gil Pepperday is the operations manager and co-owner of Pepperday & Sons Mortuary Services, which has served the East Valley of metropolitan Phoenix since 1974. His grandfather founded the business; his father expanded it; Gil has, by his own description, "mostly just kept the coolers running." We spoke in his office on a Tuesday morning in late September 2029, during what he called "the back nine of the season." The air conditioning was set to 68. He offered me water twice before I sat down. He did not offer coffee.¹

You've been in the business how long now?

Gil: Twenty-six years full-time. Longer if you count sweeping the chapel as a teenager, which I don't, because my father didn't.

How has the seasonal pattern of your work changed?

Gil: So when my grandfather ran this place, death was — I don't want to say evenly distributed, that sounds like a logistics term. Which I guess it is now. But it used to be more spread out. You had your flu season bump in winter, your slight uptick in summer, and the rest was just steady. You could staff for it.

Now we have a season. Capital-S. May through October. The county surveillance window opens, the cooling centers open, we open our overflow unit. It's like retail, almost. You have your Christmas rush. Ours is July.

When did you first notice the shift?

Gil: Honestly? The year the county brought in the containers.² That was 2023. I'd been seeing the numbers climb for years, we all had, but there's something about refrigerated trailers in a parking lot that makes it official.

After that summer I stopped thinking of it as a bad year. It was just the year. And then the next one was worse, and then the next one was — well, 2024 was actually slightly better, statistically.³ We threw a party. We did not throw a party.

Walk me through July.

Gil: July is when I bring on two part-time intake coordinators and a second transport driver. We run the overflow cooler, a 40-foot container unit out back, holds thirty-five.⁴ I lease it May through September now. Used to be June through August. The lease got longer before the summers did, if that makes sense. You plan for what's coming, not what's here.

A normal week in February, we might process eight, ten decedents. A July week, we're at twenty-five, thirty. And the mix changes. More M.E. holds, because more of the deaths are reportable — outdoor deaths, unattended deaths, deaths where the circumstances are, you know, not straightforward.⁵

Those cases sit longer. Tox screens, scene investigation. So your storage fills up not because more people are dying per se, but because the ones who are dying take longer to release.

The M.E. holds — how long are we talking?

Gil: Depends. Could be a week. Could be six weeks if tox is backed up. Last summer I had a gentleman with us for fifty-three days. His family called every Friday.

What did you tell them?

Gil: That we were waiting on the county. Which was true.

You mentioned the mix changes in summer. What does that look like on the certificate?

Gil: On paper. Right. So — okay. I receive the certificate. I don't write it. That's the M.E., or the attending physician, or whoever certifies. By the time it gets to me, the cause of death is already there. Cardiac arrest. Renal failure. Polysubstance toxicity. And then sometimes, underneath, "environmental heat exposure" as a contributing factor.

Or sometimes not.

And you can tell the difference?

Gil: I can tell that a man was found on a bus bench on July 19th and his certificate says acute cardiac event. I can tell that a woman was in a third-floor apartment with a window unit that hadn't worked since May and her certificate says hypertensive crisis. I'm not a forensic pathologist. I don't make the determination. But I've been receiving these certificates for twenty-six years, and I have a sense of the pattern.

Do families ever push back on what the certificate says?

Gil: [pause] Both directions.

You get families who want heat on there, because they want it acknowledged. They want someone to know their father didn't just have a heart attack — he had a heart attack because it was a hundred and eighteen degrees and the power went out. They want the context on the record.

And then you get families who absolutely do not want heat on there. Because "heat-related death" sounds like nobody was watching. It sounds like the person was outside, like homelessness, or negligence, or — I had a woman last August, her mother died in her own home, in her own bed, with the AC on. The AC was on. It just wasn't enough. The certificate said heat was a contributing factor and the daughter wanted it removed. She said, "My mother was not a statistic."

And I — what do you say to that? She's right. Her mother was not a statistic. But she's also — she is one. She's in the count. Or she would be, if the count were accurate, which.⁶

Which is a whole other thing.

You were going to finish that sentence.

Gil: No I wasn't.

What's the cremation timeline like during the surge?

Gil: Fast. Arizona's already at eighty percent cremation, give or take.⁷ In July it's higher. Families want it done. We want it done. Storage is the bottleneck, and every case we can move through disposition frees up a slot. We can usually turn a cremation in forty-eight to seventy-two hours if there's no M.E. hold. If there is, we're back to the Friday phone calls.

Does any of this get easier?

What happens in October?

Gil: I return the container. I let the part-timers go. I do the maintenance on the primary cooler. And then it's November, and it's seventy-five degrees, and people die the way they used to die, and I think, okay. Okay. And then it's May again.

Gil Pepperday is a fictional character. The world he describes is drawn from documented public health data, county medical examiner reports, and mortuary industry sources from the American Southwest, 2023–2026. The 2029 setting reflects a modest forward projection of trends already underway.

Footnotes

1. Gil Pepperday and Pepperday & Sons Mortuary Services are fictional. Any resemblance to actual funeral directors, living or dead, is — well, in this line of work, you learn not to finish that sentence. ↩

2. In July 2023, Maricopa County brought ten refrigerated containers to a parking lot near the medical examiner's office to handle overflow. The M.E.'s office has standard capacity for 224 bodies and surge capacity for 358. NBC News, July 28, 2023. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/phoenix-extreme-heat-wave-deaths-refrigerated-containers-rcna96673 ↩

3. Maricopa County recorded 645 heat-related deaths in 2023 and 602 in 2024 — the first year-over-year decline since 2014. Maricopa County Department of Public Health, 2024 Final Report. https://www.maricopa.gov/CivicAlerts.asp?AID=3222 ↩

4. A 40-foot refrigerated container unit holds up to 35 bodies. Container-based systems became standard surge infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic. American Mortuary Coolers, 2025. https://www.mymortuarycoolers.com/blogs/news/inside-morgue-cold-storage-systems ↩

5. Between April and October, Maricopa County death investigators specifically ask about heat in every case and check the temperature of rooms where people are found. Heat is considered a potential factor any time temperatures exceed 95°F. NPR, June 11, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/30/nx-s1-4854224 ↩

6. An ABC15 investigation found at least 50 cases in 2024 where experts questioned why heat was not considered in the cause of death. In one case, a medical examiner dismissed heat at 108°F because the decedent was "acclimated to the heat." ABC15, July 15, 2025. https://www.abc15.com/news/local-news/investigations/uncounted ↩

7. Arizona's cremation rate is estimated at 72–80% and projected to reach 91% by 2045. US-Funerals.com, April 2026. https://us-funerals.com/cremation-costs-in-arizona/ ↩