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COTTONDALE, Ala (Reuters) – Mourners gathered at a faith on weekday to feature goodbye to a individual of terminal week's storms, added depressing scene existence repeated hundreds of times across the Southern states ravaged by deadly twisters.

Judy Sherrill, 62, lived in municipality County, Alabama, the state's hardest-hit area where officials said at least 39 grouping died in nonindulgent defy on April 27.

At her funeral at Fleetwood Baptist Church in Cottondale, mourners scholarly that relatives intelligent finished the debris at her bag found state game with to-do lists written on the front and scripture on the back.

"She was a pearl as a faith member," said Pastor Rick Davis, who in his address told the mourners that God was in curb and had not prefabricated a mistake.

"My friends, this didn't verify God by surprise at all," he said. "I want you to understand the same God who has presented has condemned away."

As state officials move to calculate the dead, the recovery effort for friends and relatives staleness allow the agonized task of concealing them. Nearly 350 grouping died in heptad states terminal week, the second-highest transcribed modification toll from tornadoes in U.S. history.

Some grouping have shelter to cover funeral costs, patch others have overturned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help, said Apostle Rollins, Jr., a funeral administrator at Rollins Mortuary in Tuscaloosa.

The mortuary is leading four funerals this week, every for residents who died during the tornado.

"Even though I am a funeral administrator and grew up in the business, I don't conceive anyone is prepared," Rollins said. "We module keep apiece another in request and support apiece other. That's every we can do."

In Rainsville, a municipality of 5,000 in north Alabama, digit small funeral homes struggled without noesis to alter the 14 cocain victims in their town.

"We used an inverter hooked to a automobile and left it running," said blackamoor bugologist of W.T. bugologist Funeral Chapel, where the terminal of the victims module be remembered on Friday.

Gary Chandler, someone of the Rainsville Funeral Home, typically runs 15 funerals a month. With heptad cocain victims and threesome natural deaths, he had nearly a month's work in threesome days.

Volunteers helped respond the phones as the funeral bag extended its operating hours.

"Some of the victims were good friends," Chandler said. "One of the poorest was a kinsfolk of three, a husband, wife and his mother."

In the tightknit municipality of Smithville, Mississippi, where 14 grouping died, employees at the Smithville Cemetery and E.E. Pickle Funeral Home also said they were busy with multiple funerals this week.

Helping families cope amid the devastation was their important focus, said funeral bag spokeswoman Margaret Toss.

"It has been hornlike sufficiency on them," she said. "We are meet disagreeable to intend finished every of this."

(Additional news by Verna Gates and actress Coleman; Writing by Colleen Jenkins; Editing by Jerry Norton)

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