In and around Port-au-Prince, the usually high standard for memorials and burials has been upended. The streets have fewer bodies now but the morgue is overwhelmed, and funeral parlors — those that have not collapsed — have more bodies than they can possibly embalm.

The wooden coffins seen in the first few days after the earthquake, lashed to trucks and station wagons, have also become harder to find. In the narrow streets behind the national cemetery where most of them are built, carpenters said they lacked wood and electricity to make more.

“They bury you like a dog,” said Pegles Fleurigine, 51, in an alleyway where he has built coffins for more than a decade. “They don’t bury you in caskets.”

Image A truck dumped rubble Saturday into a mass grave in Titanyen, a village on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. Credit... Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Wood chips hung in his wide mustache. Thin and tall, with a white mask on his forehead, he stood next to a blue and silver coffin, lacquered like a souped-up Cadillac.

“The people this belongs to, they are trying to get money so they can come and get it,” he said.

An even starker contrast between death as it was and death post-earthquake could be seen through a fallen wall leading into the national cemetery a few blocks away. Far into the distance, there were above-ground crypts freshly painted powder blue, with elaborate crosses and poetic names like Famille Leonon Maxi. Up close, there was a hole with the teeth marks of a backhoe and a half-dozen decaying bodies dumped and left.

Some were too swollen to be recognizable, but at one point on Sunday, a young girl in a white flowered dress stared at a dead young man. He had the frame of an athlete, and he wore designer jeans with a wide stylish belt.