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On the main website of the Ira Kaufman Chapel, a funeral home serving the Jewish community, there’s a list of upcoming services, with dates and times of services and burials. In the past, it might reflect a variety of tributes, but in recent weeks, all names of the recently departed are followed by “a private family graveside service.”
There will be no group mourning, no hugs of condolence, no murmured words of comfort from friends. Ten, and no more than 10, individuals may gather in the cemetery to lay the dead to rest, and only outdoors, at the burial ground.
David Techner (Courtesy photo)
It’s the way the Kaufman organization is balancing the needs of the bereaved with the best advice of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said David Techner, a funeral director at the funeral home. No groups larger than 10. When 23 people gathered at one recent funeral, the family was asked to choose 13, and request that they retreat to their cars and watch the prayers on their smartphones.
Such are the ways Covid is upending one of humanity’s oldest rituals – burying the dead.
Memorials TBA
At Lynch & Sons, a family-owned group of six funeral homes in southeast Michigan, wheren Covid has pushed business up by 20 percent, similar arrangements are being made, said Paddy Lynch, a funeral director at the Clawson location. But the chairs in the various rooms are set up far apart, and the mourners, few.
Most families, he said, are choosing to have an immediate burial or cremation, with a memorial service sometime in the future, after the health crisis has passed.
In some ways, it sounds like accounts of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, when funerals in some cities were limited to 15 minutes and restricted to immediate family only, for fear of spreading the disease further, and also to make room for the sheer volume of the deceased.
The short, private funerals are only part of it.
“It’s insult to injury,” Lynch said. Because many of the Covid dead were elderly residents of nursing homes, where visitation has been restricted or eliminated to slow the spread of coronavirus, their loved ones “haven’t been able to see the person because they were quarantined, and now can’t see them in death. That’s extremely difficult.”
The business has chosen not to embalm the bodies of those who’ve died of Covid, Lynch said. The process involves aspirating the lungs, and while staff members wear protective gear when doing so, the CDC and World Health Organization are divided on whether it is entirely safe, and Lynch said they decided to err on the side of safety.
And so, all over Metro Detroit, the services are like those at the Kaufman home – short, small, private, and with hopes that the dead can be properly honored at a memorial service eventually.
But at least Lynch and Techner are able to cope with the sudden increase in business. In funeral homes that serve an African-American clientele, the phone never stops ringing.
“We’re working 14-, 18-hour days,” said Stephen Kemp, owner of Kemp Funeral Home and Cremation Services, in Southfield. “I had three calls yesterday, two already this morning and five on Wednesday. (Last night) was the first night I’ve slept through until 6 a.m.”
'Mass casualties' in the black community
But that’s what it’s been like across the spectrum of black-owned funeral homes, as Covid-19 has disproportionately ravaged African Americans in Detroit and elsewhere, he said. Kemp said he has ordered a refrigerated truck to hold bodies outside his facility, a grim reminder of the volume he and his staff are handling.
Stephen Kemp (Courtesy photo)
“I’ve done mass-casualty events before,” he said, including Northwest Airlines Flight 255, the 1987 crash that killed 156 people shortly after takeoff from Detroit Metro Airport. “But I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Besides the numbers of the dead, the problem is aggravated by bottlenecks at every stage of the process – getting death certificates and cremation permits, all while trying to serve grieving families who, like those at funeral homes everywhere, are limited to rooms with no more than 10 people.
Kemp said their staff is allowing people to pass by caskets in a trickle, to allow mourners to at least see the deceased one last time. “The only saving grace in all this is livestreaming,” he said. “At least people get some semblance of closure.”
“Most people don’t want a service,” said John Caver, owner of Caver Funeral Home in Detroit, a small facility that serves a primarily African-American clientele. “They want it over with.”
“This is what I’m hearing all day long,” said Caver. “‘I had it and got better, then my husband got it and died.’ It’s really hitting black people.”
(This week, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer formed the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities, to examine the subject and make recommendations on how to address the disparity.)
Video streaming has caught on widely in recent years. The Ira Kaufman home branched into streaming video of funerals 12 years ago, and the practice has been vital in this time of separation, Techner said. A man died in recent days who had daughters in New York and California, neither of whom was able to make it, but both of whom watched on their computers.
The Lynch & Sons homes do the same. To Lynch, whose facility is accustomed to accommodating large gatherings, it’s surreal to see these accommodations.
“You’ll have three people in the room and the rest watching a tele-funeral,” said Lynch. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
It’s an extraordinary time to be a funeral director, but to Lynch, it underlines the meaning and purpose of the gathering.
“How strange it is to see so many empty seats,” he said. “It shows people how therapeutic and cathartic funerals are. The togetherness, grieving together – we do that for a reason.”
Kemp described his job, in recent weeks, as concentrating on serving one family at a time, while a line of those waiting for his attention grows behind him.
“Personally, I’m doing OK,” he said. “Spiritually, I tell people this profession is for a certain kind of people. You gotta care. Nothing gets between me and a family. It’s a calling. We enjoy what we do. I tell people, ‘We bury the dead and serve the living.’”
