In this article, we’ll be reading one funeral director’s experience of navigating through the risk of the pandemic, offering heartfelt services and coping with the pain they experience as they are the last responders of grief, loss and burden.
Nathan Streed, owner of Harvey Anderson and Johnson funeral homes usually wake up at 6 in the morning and cap the day at 5:30 in the afternoon. However, since the Covid-19 has taken so many lives from the day it started, Streed’s phone never stopped ringing.
Streed is on the edge of such circumstances as these deaths are not only beyond lonely, they’re also risky. Funeral directors such as Streed has to navigate through the processes and provider services for families that are grieving in these uncertain times.
Funerals, unlike before have taken a toll to funeral directors’ mental, physical and emotional health. These end-of-life rituals are conducted in a restricting manner, limiting physical attendants to half the building’s capacity and ensuring social distancing, hand sanitizing, and masking requirements all throughout.
What’s more, funeral directors are forced to reinvent mourning processes such as livestreaming and virtual sessions. However, this technological advancement is not always available for those who can’t afford it. This information alone makes funeral directors feel disheartened and lonely.
Mourning and accepting grieve is made easier when people gather together, share heartwarming stories, they’ll laugh, cry and eventually move on. But, with this pandemic, this is not possible. For Streed, this is a huge loss.
“As funeral director, he gives his best to help out. It’s very difficult and it’s very challenging because we have to go above and beyond our normal scope of services and be human in these times”, Streed said.
Other services are reportedly postponed until the pandemic ends. For some, it is important to be safe now and hold a remembrance event or a memorial later when everything’s okay.
However, such delay poses an incomplete mourning process. There can be moments where a family looks over and fails to accept the loss already. Some moments can be, “we’re okay with it” and others, “we still miss our beloved dearly.”
Depending on the decision of the family and the urgency for the celebration, others choose to hold a semblance of a funeral. For example, family members going for work in another state and cannot attend the event will choose to remember their departed through a memorial type funeral.
This is where funeral directors come in and offer solutions fit for the family.
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