Funerals around the country are a lot different these days. A comforting embrace could be a death sentence. Neighbors still tell a grieving widow what a profound influence her husband had on their lives, but they have to stand 6 feet apart. There are no funeral luncheons of deli meats and salads shared over fond memories. Tearful toasts to the lives of the dead are a thing of the past.
Funerals are mostly limited to 10 people, max.
“What happens if Mom dies?” says John Wenig of Wisconsin, one of 13 children, turning over in his head a question that would have been unfathomable two months ago.
“Which of her 10 children can attend her funeral?”
Wenig’s mother is healthy, he says. Still, as a funeral director and as a brother, he’s haunted both professionally and personally by the dilemma the coronavirus pandemic has dealt people already drowning in grief.
“These are difficult decisions people are having to make,” Wenig says.
The new coronavirus is changing how Americans grieve.
And the United States is increasingly a country in grief.
This week, the country eclipsed China — the original epicenter for the new coronavirus — both in the number of people who have been sickened by the pandemic and in the number of people who died from it.
Although the epicenter of the new coronavirus has shifted to New York, “look at us today, see yourself tomorrow,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo grimly warned the rest of the country this week, after the White House unsettled Americans with projections that the coronavirus death toll could climb to 240,000, even with social distancing measures.
More death is coming. More grief is coming. More funerals and Masses, more Jewish shivas and Muslim prayer services, more secular memorial services — if they’re held at all. In Washington state, funerals are banned altogether.
Some areas are taking social distancing guidelines more serious than others, including when it comes to funerals.
Just this week in New Jersey, 15 people were charged with violating Gov. Phil Murphy’s ban on gatherings after police were called to disperse a crowd that gathered for the funeral of a prominent rabbi.
‘We Never Dreamt’ This Would Happen
In normal times when someone dies, family members scattered across the country drop what they’re doing and come together to spend time with one another in an intimate setting where, Wenig says, “there’s a lot of hugging, touching, kissing and crying, which are meaningful and therapeutic parts of grief.”
Grief is compounded when physical closeness with other people is denied, even for the very good reason of slowing the spread of the virus, funeral directors say.
They’re doing what they can to make funerals intimate and meaningful, but “this is something we never dreamt we would have to deal with,” says Wenig, a National Funeral Directors Association board member and the owner of two funeral homes in eastern Wisconsin.
Bereaved families understand, too, “but are totally disheartened,” Wenig says. He shared the story of a widow whose rhetorical question cut to the quick of the matter:
“You mean we’ve been together for 60 years, and I can’t even have a funeral for him?”
“Families have been extremely understanding,” says Michael Lanotte, executive director and CEO of the New York Funeral Directors Association. “It’s definitely having a negative impact and a sad impact, but people are trying to work through the parameters necessary to get things fixed and back to normal.”
Many funeral directors are implementing technology to livestream funerals and gather, however separately in their individual homes, extended family members, friends and others who want to say goodbye.
Historically and culturally, funerals are a response to the covenant that exists between families and the communities they live in, Wenig explains. Communities lose something when neighbors and friends can’t follow their natural inclination to support one another in times of loss.
Wenig says he and other funeral directors have seen the number of online condolences triple or even quadruple as social distancing guidelines limit who can attend funerals.
“Typically, online comments used to be from people who could not attend, or in our area, the snowbirds who would normally be here, or someone who knew the deceased casually, but not well enough to come to visitation — ‘I cared for your mother at the nursing home’ or ‘I remember your dad so well from when I was in junior high; I delivered the paper and he was kind,’ ” he says.
“Now, that’s all different. It’s next-door neighbors. It’s nieces and nephews and friends who would definitely be at the funeral.”
Online condolences are the equivalent of a virtual hug that families can draw strength from as they wade through grief that even in normal times can be paralyzing, Wenig says.
“This whole event has caused funeral homes to be more creative with livestreaming the services we have,” he says. “We encourage people to share pictures back and forth. It’s helped us find new ways to allow families to give and receive support from each other.”
‘Please Don’t Forget The Family’
Many families hold private family funerals now and plan to hold public memorial services after the coronavirus crisis is over, according to Wenig and Lanotte. The solution isn’t ideal, they say, but it gives families some immediate closure that will help them adjust to life without their loved one, and more-intimate support later on when they may actually need it more.
“Please don’t forget the family,” Wenig says.
Grieving is a long process.
Funerals are just “the short part,” Wenig says, and while delaying services can interrupt the grieving process, it’s important that families not try to skip over it.
“Grief will always manifest itself at some point, in one way or another,” he says. “It can manifest in a healthy way. But for those people who choose not to have a funeral and go right back to work the next day, sooner or later that family will have to come back and revisit that issue in their life — hopefully sooner rather than later, and hopefully it does not manifest in negative ways, which we call repressed grief.”
‘I Just Want To Bury My Wife’
The conundrum grieving families find themselves in extends to America’s clergy. They’re still able to officiate at graveside services, but the services have only echos of funerals held in houses of worship.
“We offer a private viewing for a group of 10, then go to the cemetery and stand 6 feet apart,” Wenig says of the stripped-down funeral services. “We encourage clergy to be brief, and then everybody goes to their car.”
Compare that to a typically hourlong Catholic funeral Mass that 76-year-old Joe Cranga wanted for his wife of 51 years. It’s an important rite for Roman Catholics to appeal to God for mercy on the deceased person’s soul.
Sue Cranga’s funeral in Brick, New Jersey, was a private family graveside service.
That’s only one of the ways the pandemic upended Sue Cranga’s funeral.
After her March 21 death, the close-knit family spent a day shy of a week in a kind of purgatory, distanced from one another as they waited on tests to determine if Sue — and, by extension, Joe — had been exposed to the virus.
Joe was deprived not only of the Mass he wanted for a wife who had faithfully loved him for more than half a century but also of those initial physical connections with his daughters, so vital in grieving.
“I just want to bury Sue,” the distraught widower told Brick Patch’s Karen Wall as he waited for the test results and, when they came, the release of her body to the funeral home. “It’s bad enough I can’t have a viewing or Mass. I’m at wit’s end. I need an answer.”
On Friday, March 27, Joe Cranga was finally able to embrace his daughters. The test came back negative.
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Delayed Coronavirus Result Puts Grieving Brick Family In Limbo Finally, The Cranga Family Is Able To Bury Their Loved One
Lanotte of the New York Funeral Directors Association says mortuaries work to accommodate clergy in services but admits that for people of faith, “grieving is not normal right now because of the circumstances.”
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