Pandemic funeral customs are back

Omicron brings grim return of Zoom services, small crowds and masks

Carolyn Adams of Middletown was known for her epic parties and magnanimous personality. For 42 years, she operated a furniture and home décor store on Durham’s Main Street.

So when Adams died on Dec. 29, four days after her 97th birthday following what her family described as a fierce battle with COVID-19, a big crowd would have likely turned out for her funeral.

“Everybody knew her,” said her daughter-in-law, Marilyn Pearson. “Probably the entire town of Durham would have come.”

But in response to the enormous spike in coronavirus cases driven by the omicron variant, her family opted for a small, outdoor gathering instead.

“Because of COVID and how highly contagious it is, we just had immediate family,” Pearson said. “We decided to do a celebration of her life later, in the spring, when things are hopefully better.”

The pandemic has upended traditional rituals of mourning in a myriad ways, from eliminating deathbed hospital visits to replacing in-person funerals with livestream services.

The coronavirus crisis hit the industry hard, said Thomas J. Tierney, owner of John F. Tierney Funeral Home in Manchester, and many families struggled with the loss of human connection that has long been part of the grieving process.

“The first go-round was a completely new and different experience than anything we ever had,” Tierney said. “It was something that caught everybody almost blind.”

For funeral home operators, even mundane tasks, such as collecting death certificates from hospitals and nursing facilities and filing them at town halls, were complicated by COVID-19. (The state has begun the process of transitioning to electronic death certificates.)

“We’ve tried to be creative to