The morticians at a San Francisco funeral home are waiting three days or more before they open a body bag, hoping the delay will diminish the potency of the novel coronavirus. In Detroit, mortuary staffers are sleeping in separate rooms from their spouses. And in Brooklyn, a funeral director sent his office staffers home to keep them from getting exposed.
With the death toll from the coronavirus growing each day, funeral directors and their employees are scrambling to confront the grim aftermath, as the pandemic reshaping how we live has also transformed what happens after we die.
Afraid of contracting and spreading the virus, funeral homes are replacing face-to-face conversations with phone calls, handing urns containing cremated remains from gloved hands to gloved hands through the windows of parked cars and dousing death certificates left on funeral home driveways with disinfectant.
They are meeting the challenge with a combination of anxiety and resolve. Funeral directors describe operating with fewer employees, avoiding older relatives and donning protective equipment, rather than the traditional suits and ties, when they retrieve bodies from homes and nursing facilities.
“Any of our staff over 60, we pretty much told them to take some time off,” said Dan Duggan, a co-owner of Sullivan’s and Duggan’s Serra Funeral Services, a San Francisco firm that has so far handled 11 known coronavirus deaths. Normally, between 300 and 500 people walk through the doors each day; now, he said, 95 percent are doing arrangements by phone or email.
The virus is pushing some funeral homes over capacity. The waits for some crematoriums in hard-hit states such as New York and New Jersey now measure in weeks, not days, and funeral directors nationwide have ordered more freezer storage to accommodate additional bodies.
‘When AIDS first came out, it was the same thing’
The fear is one that, for some longtime funeral directors, harks back to an earlier epidemic.
“When AIDS first came out, it was the same thing. It was huge — everyone was terrified of everything,” said Scott McAulay, the owner of Scott McAulay Family New Options Funeral Services in Fullerton, Calif.
Duggan remembers the embalmers’ union in San Francisco pushing for a contract provision that would allow them to refuse to embalm bodies known to have been infected with HIV, which causes AIDS like the coronavirus causes covid-19.
“Now that we know more about AIDS and HIV, the fear is not there anymore,” Duggan added. “But we don’t quite know enough about the coronavirus yet.”
Many funeral directors now act as though all bodies could be infected.
“From white gloves to latex gloves,” said Major Clora Jr., president and founder of Clora Funeral Home, which has three locations in the Detroit area and has handled dozens of confirmed and suspected coronavirus cases.
Some of his staffers, recognizing they might be exposed in the course of their work, have started sleeping in their basements while their spouses sleep upstairs, Clora said.
“It’s just presumed right now,” said Patrick Schoen, managing partner of Jacob Schoen & Son Funeral Directors, a New Orleans funeral home founded in 1874 in response to a local outbreak of yellow fever.
“Either [the bodies] weren’t tested, or the test hasn’t come back yet. And the family doesn’t know, and we don’t know either,” Schoen said. “So we just treat everyone like it’s covid.”
He added: “It’s very, very stressful for all of our employees to be working right now.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that funeral homes can continue to embalm bodies, but it has advised morticians to wear protective gear, a commodity that some are struggling to obtain.
Keila Crucet, the funeral director in charge at Serenity Funeral Home in North Lauderdale, Fla., said her facility’s orders of protective equipment have been canceled.
“We’re not doctors and nurses . . . we’re not front lines,” Crucet said. “But we’re also working on these cases.”
Duggan said he acted quickly to obtain protective gear after the virus reached the United States. The desks and doorways at his Bay Area facilities are now furnished with industrial hand sanitizer dispensers. Staffers wear masks at all times. And bodies are double-bagged at the hospital.
Despite the precautions, Duggan decided that any bodies destined for embalming must be left in their bags for at least a few days.
“That’s just an internal decision we made here, just hoping the virus starts to be less vibrant after three to four days,” he said. (Washington Post)