Funeral homes strained as death toll keeps rising
Providing safety becomes just as vital as consoling mourners
While San Antonio froze over, funeral director Michael Hoffman Jr. was sleeping on a couch in his office and calling clients by candlelight to reschedule services for their loved ones.
The Mission Park funeral home on Southeast Military Drive, like so many other places in the city, had lost power during the bitter cold streak in mid-february. Down the street, some of Hoffman’s staff were staying in hotel rooms to ensure they could get to work. They had to brave the roads, slick with snow and ice, to pick up the bodies of those who died during the weeklong disaster.
The paralyzing storm had made matters only worse. For several months before it, many funeral homes across the city were straining to handle a second surge of lives lost to the coronavirus. More than 600 deaths were reported in January alone, the most in any month of the pandemic so far, according to Metropolitan Health District data.
Among those who died from COVID-19
was Maria Concepcion Garcia, 85, who passed away Jan. 13 after being treated at Metropolitan Methodist Hospital for four or five days, said her daughter, Sylvia Jaramio. She and other family members couldn’t be with Garcia in the hospital because of the visitation ban in place for protection from the virus.
“We heard her last breaths on the phone,” Jaramio said about her mother, who was known as “Conchie.” “We didn’t get to see her or touch her or give a goodbye.”
Garcia’s visitation and funeral a month later was the first time her daughter had seen her since an ambulance rushed her to the hospital.
Fifteen of Garcia’s friends and family sat in pews, separated by household, with every other row left empty, in the chapel of Treviño Funeral Home while others watched the services via livestream. Attendees clad in face masks gathered at the casket, a sheet of plexiglass shielding them from her body, another virus precaution.
One of the few signs of normalcy: a version of the Beatles’ song “Let It Be” played in the background as family photos faded in and out on a screen, depicting Garcia’s vacations to San Francisco, Niagara Falls and Mexico.
Like everything else in its path, the pandemic has transformed business as usual for funeral homes.
Providing safety is now on equal footing with extending comfort to the grieving. Funerals are livestreamed for display on personal computers, on large screens in parking lots, on sides of buildings and in people’s backyards. Another socially distanced option is the drive-by funeral: The body is placed under a tent outside where relatives and friends can say goodbye from their cars.
Inside funeral homes, maskwearing is mandatory, and social distancing signs and hand cleaning stations are everywhere.
Mission Park, which has nine locations locally, procured hand sanitizer in 55-gallon drums and a machine that disinfects the air inside buildings, said Dick Tips, CEO of Mission Park Funeral Chapels, Cemeteries and Crematories. After an early shortage of personal protective equipment for its staff, the company doubled or tripled its orders just in case.
The sheer number of deaths — the surge this winter came on the heels of one in the summer that was equally devastating — has funeral homes scrambling to meet demand.
Mission Park built a refrigerated care facility for 500 bodies and bought three refrigerated trailers that can hold about 78 bodies each, Tips said.
Treviño Funeral Home and Funeraria del Angel Roy Akers downtown had twice as many funerals as usual during both surges. The national company that owns both had to bring in staff from out-of-state locations.
For some employees, eighthour days stretched to 13 hours.
“A lot of our staff who have kids, they leave before they’re awake and don’t get home until they’re asleep,” said Nancy Lew, the location manager for Roy Akers downtown.
Steven Dunbar-rodney, a funeral director at Roy Akers, said the work can be all-consuming.
“As soon as you walk in through those double doors that you came in through, you leave the outside world there; nothing in your personal life matters. And once you walk outside those double doors to go home, everything remains here.”
“I’ll be honest, there have been times I’ve broken down,” he added. “You have to push through it.”
Even with the use of protective equipment, Lew caught the virus in June, three more employees got it in July and Dunbar-rodney caught it in December, further straining the staff.
Lew said the funeral homes were so busy that they had to postpone arrangement conferences with some families, sometimes for as long as three weeks. Even now, with deaths declining somewhat, families are waiting about a week to start planning services at Roy Akers.
“We know what the family’s going through,” Lew said. “To see it just be prolonged because of the increase in calls, it hurts us.”
Mission Park saw a 30 percent to 40 percent increase in funerals from January 2020 to January of this year, Tips said. He has hired 100 more employees, bringing the staff to 400.
Getting to know each family takes time, Tips said, while the phones hardly stop ringing.
“There’s so much detail involved in each and every service” to make them unique and special, he said.
“Having to see the family have to choose who gets to come to the actual service” because of social distancing requirements is one of the more difficult changes in funerals, said Tips’ wife, Kristin, who is Mission Park’s president and a funeral director.
Families have been understanding even if some guests are left out, Lew said.
“They don’t want to lose any more family members,” she said.
Some have opted to postpone funerals altogether, she said, and wait out the pandemic until more people feel it is safer to attend.
Though funeral directors don’t put a timetable on when families should have services, they do need to consider how the body will look over time.
“Embalming was never made to be a permanent preservation of a body,” said Hoffman, funeral director and general manager for Mission Park. “It just merely prepares and disinfects the body and prepares the body to be presented in public.”
In some circumstances, the wait for burial in a cemetery has grown to almost six months. Directors suggest to families that they have the viewing and other services sooner rather than later, and the funeral home can preserve the body until it’s buried.
Families are also feeling the financial strain of funerals, especially when a death is sudden and quicker than expected.
To alleviate some of that stress, Mission Park stuck to 2016 pricing, Dick Tips said. “We’re working harder than we ever have for less money,” he said.
It also negotiates a payment plan with families so a large bill isn’t due all at once.
Roy Akers also works with families to stay within their means, Lew said.
Some families are eligible to be reimbursed for funerals by the Federal Emergency Management Agency if their loved one died from the coronavirus between Jan. 20, 2020, and the end of that year.
With the winter surge tailing off and vaccinations for the virus ramping up, funeral homes could find time to regroup in case of another surge.
Their staffs are getting vaccinated, thanks to the state putting embalmers and funeral home workers among the first in line.
Despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to reverse the statewide mask mandate and allow businesses to operate at full capacity, some funeral homes are not ready to drop the safety precautions.
Roy Akers will still require staff and clients, as well as guests, to wear masks inside. Staff will also encourage family and friends to socially distance.
Mission Park also is not making changes just yet and will follow local trends for places of worship.
“I haven’t seen a difference in the way right now families are responding,” Kristin Tips said. “They are still wanting to keep their distance.”