This essay is part of Survive. Thrive. Evolve: How Two Years of the Pandemic Impacted Us Around the World, a global HuffPost project featuring individuals writing about how their lives were affected after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The following piece originally appeared on HuffPost UK.

As a burial expert, Im confronted by grief all the time. The pandemic, however, was a whole new ball game. And it changed me.

My mother, who was my best friend, died in 2013, and it had a profound effect on me and the work I do.

I didnt have the best childhood. I was naughty in school and, after experiencing some racist violence, I even meddled with gang life. But my mother helped ground me. She believed I could do more with my life. At the age of 27, I went to university and I turned my life around.

I became a social worker, doing gang mediation and working with vulnerable young people in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. I left the organization after 12 years of service and in 2013 joined the 13 Rivers Trust charity and its programs: the Muslim Burial Fund and Eden Care UK, a service led by Black, Asian and minority ethnic folks that supports and empowers the terminally ill and those at the end of their lives.

Our objective is to work with communities, both young people who have been left behind, and older, terminally ill people without loved ones. The work is inspired by how our parents first-generation Bangladeshis had limited language and resources, but always supported their families and friends in Bangladesh as well as our community here in the U.K.

But when COVID-19 hit, we found ourselves facing an unprecedented challenge. As part of my work with the Muslim Burial Fund , I began performing Islamic rituals and burial rites. My team and I assisted in the burial of 152 people during the peak of pandemic deaths.

Normally, the team would attend to 30 deaths a year, but in the pandemic, we saw that same figure in a month.

Some days, I was burying up to eight bodies a day.

We were inundated with referrals from all walks of life. The Muslim community suffered disproportionate deaths and illness in the U.K. at the beginning of the COVID crisis. So many people were dying.

There were so many restrictions on social contact, too. There were a couple of cases we saw where children who had said goodbye to their dad, who went to the hospital to be treated for COVID and they never saw him again.

Only a few people were allowed in the burial ground, including us. We had to use Facebook Live so that people could be part of the Janazah, or Muslim funeral.