I’m a Funeral Director. The Coronavirus Has Changed Everything About My Job.

Im m an eco-friendly funeral director, which means that I manage green burials, often upstate in rural cemeteries, with the body on a burial board, wrapped solely in a cotton burial shroud. Now, two or three weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, I have a new way of functioning.

I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time during this tragic moment in American history. People need a kind soul to guide them through the experience of planning an unanticipated funeral. I also help them understand they won’t be having a participatory, family-centered funeral because we’re all keeping a safe distance from each other.

It’s no longer possible for me to help manage eco-friendly services, where the body is naturally returned to the soil. People who have died of Covid — or of suspected Covid — have to be placed in a plastic burial pouch to protect those handling them from possible transmission. Even though we know the virus dies at death, it’s conceivable the lungs of the deceased person may still contain droplets of the virus, and that the surface of the skin may still hold the virus. Handling the body could be a danger to the funeral home personnel who are all enduring long-term exposure. Even though we are forced to use disinfectant sprays, we still treat deceased people with a lot of love and care. We’re just using a lot of caution and keeping families calm.

The coronavirus has changed my life as a funeral director quite a bit. I’ve always prided myself on meeting with families, sitting down with them at a table, hugging them when it’s appropriate—of course, that’s no longer possible. We’re managing all funeral arrangements remotely and I’m having meaningful conversations with some people by phone and by Skype, and eventually we’ll be doing Zoom memorial services. But for the time being, it’s very sad for funeral directors everywhere to be wanting to extend condolences and touch family members, but we can’t do that at all.

You see, Covid influences even the funerals of people who didn’t die of the disease. My first significant socially distanced funeral was about nine days ago, a Jewish graveside service. It was not a Covid death, the gentleman had died of Parkinson’s, and yet because of the presence of Covid in the community, the grown sons were unable to visit their dad as he was dying. They didn’t want to expose their dad or mom.

I wore a mask and gloves to the cemetery and held my pen with a Clorox wipe to do the paperwork; we all wore masks at the grave. A rabbi came and read beautiful prayers; it was a very touching service, but we were all standing around the open grave that the casket had been lowered in, standing six to 10 feet apart from each other, never shaking hands, never hugging or touching. It made the funeral even more powerful because there was this sense that, my God, we’re dealing with adversity here. Not only is this family’s beloved father no longer alive, but we’re coping with a situation that is bigger than any of us.

It’s just very sad that this virus seems to be killing some elderly people so quickly; either there’s no time to go to the hospital, or people fear things are maybe worse at the hospital, so we’ll try to ride out the virus at home. I’ve had at least five phone conversations with families with a dead person in the home, in their own bed, having died of something — presumably the virus. Not everyone had time to get tested. A couple of families have insisted that their loved one didn’t have Covid, as if there’s some kind of stigma. But funeral directors have learned to see everything as Covid even when it hasn’t been diagnosed.

In the old days, these kinds of undetermined deaths fell under the jurisdiction of the New York City medical examiner’s office, which is our coroner here. And those individuals would have been transferred to the medical examiner for analysis and sometimes possible conversation with the personal physician. But with these cases — and this is what’s really sad about them — the families are stuck in the house with the body because the medical examiner is hoping that the funeral director will claim the body, and the funeral director is hoping that the medical examiner will pick the case, because we can’t move forward without a proper cause of death from a physician. Our morgues and funeral homes are becoming so full we can’t take people in the way we used to. As this conversation deepens between the funeral director and the medical examiner, the family is sort of stuck with grandma in bed.

So without intending to, a lot of these families are ending up with a home funeral that they didn’t even want, but they now recognize it’s one way to find meaning in this whole experience. I’ve been counseling these families stuck in the middle. I say to them, “This is your wake. Light a candle, put on music, you’re going to have a funeral in the old-fashioned way like they did in the 1800s. Stay calm, keep trying to work it out with the medical examiner. We don’t have any room in our morgue at the moment but if you could just sit tight and put on music, enjoy your time with your loved ones, like you might at a funeral service, keep up your precautions. If it’s suspected Covid, you still need to be masked and wearing gloves and continue whatever you were doing as a caretaker.” I ask them to put some alcohol on a washcloth and place it over the face and nose of the deceased to keep droplets of the virus from coming out of the lungs. We don’t think people are still contagious after death, but we just want to make sure that family members are safe and taking precautions.

I’m not sure every one of the deceased people our team has helped get buried or cremated was officially diagnosed with Covid before they died. Early on, there were normal deaths as well as presumed Covid flying around. We had one death where we claimed the deceased person and transferred them out of the nursing home into our facility. The team of funeral directors I work with placed the deceased in a cremation casket, put her in the refrigerator. The next day they heard from the physician at the nursing home saying, “Guess what? I said it was pneumonia but now the test has come back positive for Covid.”

That traumatized some funeral team members because at the time they weren’t ruthlessly protecting themselves with every single case. Now they presume every single death coming through this establishment is Covid; we have to suit up and protect ourselves each time. The National Funeral Director’s Association has issued reports there’s not a lot of risk related to handling the deceased person’s body; we’ll see how many of the mortuary workers get sick in the coming weeks. We still need to be very, very careful.

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