The novel coronavirus and the social distancing guidelines that followed it have made planning funeral services trickier than they ever needed to be.
How do you plan a full slate of services for the deceased when you can only have 10 or fewer people together in one gathering? It’s a question that has led many families to postpone visitations and memorial services until the “curve” of new cases flattens and social distancing guidelines are at least eased — whenever that may be.
Plant City-area funeral homes have wrestled with the problem and have come to very different solutions.
Wells Memorial and Event Center faced that challenge two weeks ago, but found a solution: keeping as many people as possible inside their cars.
The funeral home’s carport window was the key to making the drive-through visitation happen. The family of Joel Walden, a third-generation Plant Citian, was the first to test the funeral home’s idea for his April 9 visitation service.
“When a family member came in — we can only have two come in to make arrangements and 10 at a gathering — I was brainstorming how we could do this so everyone can still see him and still bring his personal items in,” René Miller, funeral director, said.
With help from the Walden family, Miller and the Wells staff worked to make sure it was as close to a traditional one as possible. While Walden himself was inside the funeral home, visible through the carport window, Wells was able to display Walden’s personal items, such as his favorite hat and his beloved banjo, outside with pictures and flowers. It was still able to play the music that would have been used under normal circumstances. Walden’s wife, Alva Janette West Walden, was seated outside next to the displays. Everyone who attended still got to sign a guest book and take a service folder.
Everyone in the 35 cars that drove up still got to see Walden and pay their respects after rolling down their windows.
“Everyone wants to have their chance to say goodbye, so us being able to place him where they could see him as they drove by gave them closure and peace,” Miller said.
The idea of a drive-through window at a funeral home is not one that was born of a pandemic. Memphis-based R. Bernard Funeral Services made some national headlines in 2017 when it started offering drive-through services as an alternate option, but other American drive-throughs existed in California, Illinois, Louisiana and Michigan prior to then. They have also been popular in Japan for the last few years.
Otherwise, it was a rare concept just two months ago. But now that COVID-19 has affected life around the world, drive-through service options are starting to become a new norm. A CNN report from April 6, for example, highlighted a Catholic priest in the hard-hit city of Madrid, Spain, who has been blessing and praying over caskets for five minutes at a time as hearses bring them to the city’s La Almudena cemetery. More funeral homes around America are making headlines in their local papers for integrating drive-through services, just like Wells.
Though the drive-through option is by no means mandatory for families at this time, Miller said Walden’s service went well enough that the funeral home will now offer the option to all interested families.
“When a family loses a loved one, if that is something they want then we are more than happy to accommodate them for sure,” she said.
Not everyone is open to the idea of drive-through services, however.
In the case of Haught Funeral Home, thinking forward wasn’t the ideal way to solve the problem. Funeral Director David Wolf instead dug deeper into his playbook and settled on bringing back an older custom: longer visitation hours.
Wolf has been in the business for 35 years and remembered working visitations that lasted several hours, if not an entire day. He also remembered how different the crowds were then, before time condensed the average visitation to roughly one hour.
“If you’re having an hour visitation, you’re assuring yourself of one thing: everybody’s gonna be there,” Wolf said. “It’s a packed house… 35 years ago, visitations were four, five, six hours long. You’d have a stream of people. I thought that was a better option than limiting it to 10 people.”
Expanding visitation hours to whatever families are comfortable with allows Haught to kill two birds with one stone. Everybody can still come throughout the day, but the spread of visitors is enough that they can stick to the 10-person limit for gatherings at any given time. There are never more than 10 people in the chapel at once, but they can also get 60 people through the building in a day and keep it properly sanitized.
Technology is also coming to the forefront with area funeral homes.
Haught and Hopewell Funeral Home and Memorial Garden have pivoted to video, now streaming services on Facebook Live and filming them to be distributed to families or, in Haught’s case, also uploaded onto its website later. That not only helps ease people’s fears about going out in public during the pandemic, Wolf said, but it also allows people who otherwise couldn’t have made the trip to watch and connect. In fact, Wolf said, one recent service reached 1,100 views on Facebook.
“When I saw 1,100 views on that video I was thinking, ‘my word,’” Wolf said. “If we were able to have the funeral with everybody there like we normally would, there may have been 200 people at the church that day. But 1,100 showed me there were a lot of people willing to take time out of their day to watch a 25-minute graveside service.”
Dann Druen, director and co-owner of Hopewell, said his funeral home is only offering private visitations and funeral services to fall in line with the guidelines. They’re asking families to consider making arrangements by phone or through a video conference instead of coming in and are offering COVID-19 discounts to customers.
“Our family’s been on these grounds since the latter half of the 1800s,” Druen said. “We opened the cemetery in ’71 and the funeral home in ’89. Our thing is treating others how we want to be treated, so it didn’t make sense at this time to charge for streaming, video recording and everything else we had to change because of COVID.”