LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Writing about dead people was never part of Steve Marble’s original plan. 

He spent his career covering foreign and national stories for The Los Angeles Times until two years ago, when he filled in on the obituary desk and, ironically, he never felt more alive.

“In an obituary, the protagonist dies in every story. That’s just the unfortunate nature of it,” Marble told Spectrum News 1. “But you’re writing about these people when they were alive when they were at their best.”

But these days, his job as the paper’s obituaries editor has become increasingly taxing, as the number of COVID-19 deaths grows by the minute. 

“Every morning I get up and there’s a list of 20, 30, 40, 50 names to add to the list,” he said. “We probably have 30 or 40 assigned and probably 80 or 90 more to assign out and that number is a constant every day. It keeps growing.”

Newspapers across the country are beefing up their obituary desks as try to capture the magnitude of the pandemic. The Times has gone from six reporters working on obituaries at any given time, to about 30.

“There’s a lot of beat writers at the paper whose beats are idled, sports writers, for instance, entertainment writers who now have little to write about, so those people have been helping us out,” Marble said. 

In an effort to humanize the loss, the Times launched a special project called, “The Pandemic’s Toll: Lives Lost in California.” So far, the paper has published more than 100 obituaries, according to Marble, and plans on writing anywhere from 400 to 500 more.

“We saw a 25-year-old kid who had just started in the pharmacy business who died. A woman who had survived Hitler and the death camps only to succumb to the virus. So these are not only sad but also cruel endings,” Marble said. 

To try and stay sane, Marble says he makes a point to disconnect from his laptop and cable news and try to focus on the positive.

“The one silver lining is I get to see the highlights of somebody’s life. Even if it ended miserably,” he said.