San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
EVEN DEATH HAS CHANGED
Saying goodbye has taken many forms over millennia; it’s suddenly changing again
Cemetery workers bury Tessie Henry, 83, in Colma. She had COVID-19 and was buried on April 8. Our rituals for how we say goodbye now have changed during shelter in place.
potato salad.”
Then she sent the poem to her family. Most said it held more meaning than the funeral itself.
It was 3 a.m. when her mother’s funeral began. Satu Sharmon had emptied her living room and filled it with flowers and candles and pictures of her mom. There were lots of red roses; red was her favorite color. She’d also placed three chairs in front of the television. Sharmon had always planned to attend her mother’s funeral. In normal times it wouldn’t be a problem. She’d get on a plane and make her way to the Finnish town where her mother lived, just two hours away from the Arctic Circle. But as the days passed, she came to realize these weren’t normal times. Finland closed its borders, and though the consulate would authorize her travel, they could not promise she’d be able to return to San Jose.
It all began to feel too risky.
“‘I’m going through several airports. What if I’m a carrier and I take it to them?’ These kinds of thoughts started to go through my mind,” she said. “And then I thought ‘What if something happens to me?’ I have a family, my husband and boys here in America.
“I got very upset. This was never my plan to miss my mom’s funeral.” And so she made her living room into a memorial and made plans with her nephew to stream the funeral live. “You have to do something. You have to feel like you did some effort.”
The service began at 1 p.m. Finland time — it was still dark in San Jose. “There was already an atmosphere …” Her husband got up, her two sons, too. They wore ties. “We were dressed up for a funeral.”
The grave had been dug. The priest said a few words, then they all sang a couple hymns. She watched from thousands of miles away as her family lowered the casket into the earth.
Afterward, she, her husband and her two boys took a family photograph in the living room.
The news out of Washington state was grim. Death had found its way into an assisted nursing facility in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland, and it was spreading quickly. Katie Jacobs Stanton was following the story. “I remember thinking this is my
worstcase scenario for my dad,” she said. Her father, Herb Jacobs, lived in a similar facility in Aurora, Colo. He was physically fit but had struggled with Alzheimer’s for many years. “My biggest fear was that he would suffer, and he would die alone.”
She called the facility often to check in, to ask about her father’s health and their plans for how to deal with an outbreak. “They were pretty on top of things,” she said. In the meantime, Stanton, a tech executive, was working with colleagues in Texas and New York and the Bay Area to get tablets to people in hospitals. At the very least they might help the dying say goodbye.
Then, three weeks ago the call came. Her father had a fever. His temperature would rise and fall, but he wasn’t in distress, they told her. “I thought ‘OK, well, you know, maybe he’ll get through this.’ ”
He got worse. Soon he was having trouble swallowing. A dose of hydroxychloroquine did nothing to help. He was put on oxygen.
One of the caregivers had brought in his iPad, and a Catholic priest delivered his last rites from miles away. That meant a lot to her dad; he was very religious. Later that day, her father’s friend sat outside her dad’s window so Stanton could talk to him over FaceTime from her home in Los Altos.
These were his last hours. Stanton told her father stories, and she told him she loved him. “I know he heard us. I think a lot of people hold on to things they want to believe, but I really do believe it.”
Two weekends back, there was a virtual wake for Herb Jacobs. One friend offered an Irish blessing from New York City. Her friend sang “Rainbow Connection” from Sonoma; songs came from Kenya, too. Stanton’s children read poems and there was a slideshow. “It ended up being really beautiful,” she said. But it was still not the ending she imagined. “The grim details of death, they get on this weird fast track, but your heart can’t possibly keep up.
“Death is disorienting, and death during the time of coronavirus is just another level of disorientation. How do you process grief when you’re quarantined at home, and you can’t be with your loved ones?” Stanton said. “There’s a reason we have these rituals after death.”
Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RyanKost