dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Covid 19 Victims– Die Alone, Buried Alone

Covid 19 Pandemic Generating Sweeping Changes to Burial Traditions/Procedures:

WaPo (important lines in single quotes):

"We’re arranging to bury the deceased, and 'people who work at our funeral home are the only witnesses to the burials.'

'We can’t let extended families visit with their loved ones one last time'. We take elaborate, painstaking precautions when handling the bodies of people who died of covid-19, to avoid spreading the epidemic….

Multiple times in the past three weeks, 'I have had to tell people they will not be seeing their deceased family members.'

Skipping the church service was hard enough, but 'not being at the graveside because of cemetery restrictions was just too much for this family to bear.' …we found a way for immediate family to say goodbye in a parking lot 'a quarter-mile from the cemetery'

But the grieving daughter had to abandon plans for the witnessed placement for cremation, where relatives watch the body be placed into the cremation chamber, because new restrictions meant the crematory could no longer allow families to be involved.

We have to double-shroud the body, masking the deceased to prevent droplets from being expelled during movement, and we place identification labels on the outside of the shroud so we don’t have to access the body….

We no longer light the candle in the room dedicated for families receiving a loved one’s urn. Instead, we ask families to call us from the parking lot so we can deliver the urn to their car and obtain a signature of release.

But now the vital-records office is closed indefinitely to maintain social distance. Our families get death certificates mailed directly from the county after we order them online on their behalf.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/coronavirus-funeral-home-burial/2020/04/01/4e9a0338-7368-11ea-85cb-8670579b863d_story.html

Story rom NJ.com :

"For Ludovino Alcantara, that meant a lonely burial under gray skies. The 86-year-old Passaic man died of complications related to the coronavirus, his relatives said… The 'only souls at his grave during the burial were the cemetery employees who carried the white casket out of the hearse and lowered it into the ground.'

Alcantara's son, Elvis, and his girlfriend, Angelica, ventured out of their car and stood in viewing distance of the grave, about '75 feet away'. They held up their phones so relatives at home could watch.After the cemetery workers backed away, a funeral director gestured to the pair to approach the grave, where they dropped a bouquet of red and white roses onto the lowered casket.

Alcantara's funeral "was really sad" said Ernesto Alvarez, whose family-owned funeral home in Passaic conducted the burial. "The man's been dead for two weeks…

'The pandemic is reminiscent of the mid-1980s, when Alvarez was working for a funeral home in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS epidemic.' "Everyone was wearing masks. Everyone was scared. It wasn't clear how the illness was spread," he recalled. In some ways, the coronavirus has made the funeral business easier, Alvarez said. "We're not doing preparations… There's no use of the facilities for viewing. All we are doing is we pick up the remains, put it in a casket, and take care of the paperwork."

https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/passaic/2020/04/01/passaic-nj-patriarch-gets-lonely-burial-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/5088692002/