Funeral homes see services starting again >>
As restrictions ease, families are scheduling services
GLENSIDE » The year of COVID that started in March 2020 is one that many will never forget, no matter how much they’d like to.
It’s been a year full of heartbreak, suffering, and loss, losses that even those who deal with death firsthand have never seen before.
“The deaths have just been it’s been something that I have not seen in all my years, and I’ve been doing this for 47 years,” said Harry May.
“I’m hopeful that we will level off, because it really is becoming — not just for families, for us as well — we’re just maxed out, as far as we just aren’t stopping,” he said.
Harry is the son of William R. May, who founded two funeral homes in Glenside and North Wales that bear his name. Since the arrival of COVID-19 in March, May said, he and his staff have had a firsthand look at the spikes, the drops, and the rays of hope that now, finally, seem to be arriving.
“At the end of April, toward the third or fourth week of April, through probably close to Memorial Day, it was incredible, the number of deaths. It just exploded in that sense, as far as, sadly, these deaths occurring,” May said.
Those weren’t all from patients proven to be COVID-positive, “maybe not the majority but let’s say 50 percent,” May said, but the numbers seemed to drop as spring turned into summer.
“That was the flattening of the curve, as they were saying, as you saw on the news, which was a good thing. And then in September, October, November, it started to pick up a little bit,” he said.
From December 1 through
mid-February, May performed 95 funerals, an average of over 30 per month during a time where a typical year only sees 20 to 22 funerals per month, May said.
“January started out the same, but then leveled off, and in the past three weeks we’ve had two,” he said.
As vaccines have been administered and the rate of deaths has slowed, local authorities have eased earlier restrictions on mass gatherings, and May said that’s led families to start to schedule funeral services: two this weekend, four next weekend, with more moving to churches rather than funeral homes because of the higher capacity.
“Most of our funerals, we have in the churches. You can get more people in than you can at a funeral home, and we do a majority of Catholic funerals, so the Catholic churches are generally
bigger than the Protestant churches,” May said.
“A lot of them will hold 800 to 1,00 people. So if you get 50 percent, you can still have a fair number of people attend,” he said.
Early in the year of Covid, churches were largely closed for Easter 2020, and the first funerals after were limited to only about a dozen people in person. Starting last summer, restrictions eased, to allow up to 50 percent capacity in most facilities across the state, outside of Philadelphia, so families have started scheduling services they could not hold last year: May said he knew of one family who had a member pass last May and will hold a formal service this June, and another around Thanksgiving now scheduled for May, while a personal friend passed in February from Covid and that family will also hold a funeral in May.
“People are doing different things, as far as whether they’re waiting. It depends on the family,” he said.
“Everybody pretty much knows what the deal is, it’s been said enough as far as all knowing what we need to do. It’s just a matter of what a family is comfortable with: doing it now, or waiting until, they hope, things will ease up like last year.”
Those services all include plenty of masks, sanitizer and safe distancing, and all of May’s four staff have now been vaccinated, with first shots in January and second doses in February. Funeral directors fall into the same categories as coroners and other health care providers, May said, and staff have come to realize how essential they are to families mourning a loss.
“Even with deaths occurring, of people dying from Covid, some people still want to do the traditional funeral, with the viewing,” he said.
“The gentleman that does the embalming for me, I had to ask him, ‘Are you willing to do it?’ I can remember, back when the AIDS virus came about in the early 1980s, and what a scare that was for everybody, so this was a similar kind of situation,” he said.
His staff have also had one case of possible exposure, but all of those exposed secondhand were tested and results came back negative, May said. As of late February, they’re all back to work, and hoping the upcoming summer sees cases drop, just like last year.
“It’s been a year I won’t ever forget.”
“It’s been something that I have not seen in all my years, and I’ve been doing this for 47 years.”
Funeral director Harry May