The Long Goodbye: Funerals Are Another Thing That Now Must Wait

Elisabeth Claire Avery, 21, learned this month that her mother's body had been found in one of Georgia's largest lakes. The next unsettling news was that there would be no traditional funeral, at least not for a while.

"She had friends in every city in Georgia, I swear," Ms. Avery said. "She loved art and music, and that's how you can celebrate her in isolation." Ms. Avery has had the difficult task of responding to the many people who have been reaching out, asking what they can do. "Listen to rock 'n' roll, which she would've liked," she tells them.

Funeral directors are stressed, too.

A board member of the National Funeral Directors Association, Chris Robinson, a fourth-generation funeral director and managing owner of Robinson Funeral Home in Easley, S.C., said members of his trade association were getting swamped with questions and requests, and scrambling to find answers. Video companies are installing cameras. Mortuaries are deciding how much room they have to store bodies for weeks or months in refrigeration. He said he thinks some of the technological innovations will stay when the crisis eventually lifts, but he also expects an emotional swing back to simpler services.

"I think this isolation by everybody is going to make them step back and really appreciate this person-to-person contact, just the basic social interaction that most of us yearn for," he said.

Mortuaries, meanwhile, like hospitals, are running low on masks and gloves that funeral workers need to protect themselves from not only the coronavirus, but other infectious diseases as well.

"It's usually two persons at a cremation, and normally we would both be there hands-on," said Clay Dippel, a provisional funeral director and embalmer at the Bradshaw-Carter home in Houston. Now, he said, only one person gets gloved up and touches a body. "Instead of using two sets of gloves, now it's one person does the lifting, the other is there to observe," he said. "Yesterday, I was the employee who wore the gloves," he added.

Meri Dreyfuss, the San Francisco tech worker who lost her sister to the coronavirus, went with another sister, Hillary Dreyfuss, up into California's majestic redwood forests and walked through the ancient groves, trying to make sense of everything that was happening in their lives, and the world around them.

"Hillary said, 'I want to be around something bigger than me,'" Meri said. "It helped."

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting from New York; Frances Robles from Key West, Fla.; and Patricia Mazzei from Miami.

McLeod's Daughters - The Long Goodbye