Coronavirus is affecting the way we mourn
Gene Ficarra’s 79-year-old mother, Ada Ficarra, died April 26 at an assisted living facility in Winter Garden after contracting the coronavirus. But Gene, who lives in Herndon, Va., can’t travel to see family in Central Florida or attend a memorial service.
“The worst part about it is not being with my family so that I can console them through this,” Ficarra said. “… The hardest part for me is not being with my children, who loved her so dearly.”
Across the world, families are having to change the way they mourn deceased relatives as the coronavirus pandemic
continues, many while separated from their usual support systems.
Funeral directors are accustomed to working with families during their worst moments, but the coronavirus pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges to their jobs and the industry as they work to comfort families during an uncertain time.
“This is something we just never really thought we were going to see in our lifetime,” said Rick Prindiville, managing funeral director of Highland Funeral Home in Apopka and treasurer of the Florida Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association. “It kind of made everybody take a little bit of a step back.”
‘A real challenge’
A funeral director’s objective now is the same as ever: comforting the loved ones of the dead. But health precautions amid the coronavirus pandemic make the task much harder, said Bob Arrington, former president of the National Funeral Directors Association and founder of Arrington Funeral Directors in Jackson, Tennessee.
“Funeral directors’ DNA is to help people, to do whatever we can to help make this time and this life transition a little easier,” Arrington said. “… It’s a real challenge to serve people during this time, and that’s what funeral directors are built to do.”
Funeral directors like to build connections with the families they serve, and it’s difficult to do so with social distancing, he said.
Because the families planning and attending funeral services pose more of a transmission risk to people working in the industry than decedents, Arrington’s business has taken precautions like shortening office hours, making hand sanitizer readily available and spacing out chairs in the chapel.
The risk of an embalmer contracting an infectious disease from a body is low when embalming is done properly, he said.
The majority of funeral homes are family-owned, which means one COVID-19 case could incapacitate a family and a business rapidly during a time when funeral directors are considered essential workers.
According to the National Funeral Directors Association, there were 19,136 funeral homes in the United
States in 2019, 89.2 percent of which were privately owned by families or individuals.
“As hard as [social distancing] is, that’s probably the most important part to protect staff, community, families, everybody concerned,” Arrington said. “Funeral directors are trying to serve families as much as and best we can [and] keep our staff safe so we can continue to serve.”
‘You don’t have that personal touch’
Funeral services usually offer a time for friends and family to comfort one another in a way that involves physical closeness, but health guidelines limiting gatherings to 10 people are forcing families to compromise.
“Every family needs a chance to grieve and have that support system around them,” Prindiville said. “And [the restriction on gatherings] just makes things very, very tough for the families. … Some people have definitely been affected by it. Other people, they’re just satisfied with having the 10 people and [saying], ‘This is what Mom or Dad would have wanted.’”
Under the new executive order reopening Florida businesses, Highland Funeral Home may be able to host 25 to 30 people for services in its building, or 25% of the funeral home’s capacity, Prindiville said. However, he is waiting on clarification of the order from Seminole County.
Families who have a loved one die during the pandemic have options, such as choosing to hold a smaller service now or waiting to hold a larger gathering. Either way, families are still burying or cremating their loved ones close to their death.
Elizabeth Franco, service manager at the National Cremation and Burial Society in Oviedo, said some families who choose to hold funeral services with her company are hosting them over video conferences or livestreaming the event.
“You don’t have that personal touch,” she said. “But we try to make it as meaningful as we can under the circumstances.”
She said she sees the pandemic having a lasting effect on the way people conduct funeral arrangements.
“There’s going to be less of an in-person arrangement; everything is going to be mostly done over the phone,” she said.
The Highland
Funeral
Home in Apopka is offering to reschedule, for free, funeral services for families who want to memorialize the deceased on a larger scale later, Prindiville said. Twenty families, or about 70% of the business’ clients, have chosen to reschedule, he said.
“Losing somebody under different circumstances brings out different grief,” Prindiville said. “You take something like this pandemic where you can’t leave your house, you’ve got to be 6 feet away … that pretty much has amplified the grief. So what we try to do is we try to remove the grief a little bit, and let everybody work at the comfort of their own pace.”
However, postponing services can extend the grieving period for families, Arrington said, another lasting effect of the pandemic.
“The pandemic has caused a lot of emotional stress and frustration with everybody, but you add a family going through grief and then you add the emotional piece, so it’s almost like a complicated grief,” he said.
‘It’s just devastating for them’
Though the COVID-19 death toll in Florida has been lower than initially predicted, thanks to the implementation of social distancing measures and safety precautions, coronavirus hot spots have popped up in other areas of the country and overwhelmed the local funeral industries.
Franco spent nearly two weeks volunteering with funeral directors in Manhattan through the National Cremation and Burial Society to help them manage the additional workload of the pandemic.
She said experiencing the effects on the funeral industry in the Orlando area following the Pulse shooting made her want to help others during a similarly overwhelming situation.
Franco said it is difficult to comfort grieving families online or over the phone, especially when the loved one who died was in isolation at the hospital prior to their death.
“I had a family saying, ‘I want to see my loved one and touch them.’ And unfortunately because of the COVID it’s impossible,” she said. “… It’s so sad that some of these families … haven’t seen their loved one when they got into the hospital, and haven’t seen them for weeks, and then they pass away and it’s just devastating for them.”
Though the pandemic has tested those in the industry, it has emphasized the reason many go into the field in the first place — to support others during hardship.
“This is what I love to do, helping families in their most difficult time, giving that peace of mind and celebrating their life,” she said. “Not being able to do my job all the way the way it’s supposed to be, it’s hard. It’s a little challenging, but we have to go with the flow.”