How the Virus Robs Families of the Rituals of Mourning

His son hoisted the spadefuls of earth that are customary during a Jewish burial. But his wife, sick with the coronavirus and quarantined at home, was not there.

No one heard a military honor guard play taps for Solomon, a Coast Guard veteran. And no one accepted a crisply folded American flag, offered on behalf of a grateful nation. Those things never happened.

In the United States, the coronavirus has stolen far more than 16,695 lives.

It has robbed families of the rituals that follow death.

Funeral services at most churches, synagogues, temples and mosques have been suspended indefinitely by social-distancing orders meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Wakes, if they happen at all, are limited to five — sometimes 10 — immediate family members.

Graveside military honors have been discontinued. Many cemeteries are permitting only one funeral home employee, one religious leader and one family representative at burials.

Nonessential services like flower shops are shuttered, leaving graves largely bare of adornment. In some Jewish families, shiva, a weeklong mourning period, is taking place on the videoconferencing app Zoom.

Solomon, 72, died last month in New Jersey while hospitalized with the coronavirus.

“It took my dad away,” Bernard Solomon, 39, said about the virus. “But it also took away our ability to comfort each other, to be with each other.”

Only five people could attend the burial, and the cemetery asked that they bring their own shovels for the symbolic final gesture. It was no longer loaning any out.

“There’s a part of me that just wants to scream: This is unfair,” Solomon said.

As hospital morgues fill and New York City contemplates contingency plans that will include burying some of the dead in a potter’s field, funeral home operators are busier than ever.

“We’re overwhelmed,” said Shawn’te Harvell, the manager of Smith Funeral Home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which got calls for 38 funerals in the last week, six times the normal rate.

While managing this surge, funeral homes are also struggling to keep up with the fast-changing rules that are upending ancient traditions.

“Day in and day out it’s up and down,” said Maryellen McLaughlin, executive director of McLaughlin Funeral Home in Jersey City, New Jersey. “It’s an emotional roller coaster for the poor family.”

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Jake Thomas, 90, died last month. The coronavirus had nothing to do with it.

But it had everything to do with the reason his 18 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren could not attend his funeral services in New Jersey.

Five members of the family were permitted to gather for a brief viewing and farewell at the funeral home, his oldest grandchild, Aasiyah Muhammad, said. Only one person could step outside the car at the cemetery to witness the burial of her grandfather, who was an Army veteran.

Muhammad was not able to participate in either.

“It’s like you’re burying a stranger, like nobody knows this person,” said Muhammad, of Irvington, New Jersey. “Nobody was there.”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Many funeral homes are turning to digital solutions — livestreaming or taping services so that family members can participate remotely or watch later. Most are working with families to plan memorial services once the threat of the coronavirus eases.

“In some ways, it’s like a doctor not being able to perform surgery on someone who needs it,” said Ellen McBrayer, the spokeswoman for the National Funeral Directors Association, who runs two funeral homes outside Atlanta, in the heart of the Bible Belt.

“Funeral homes and the funeral home workers want to meet families where they are in their grief, and this has changed everything.”

Patrick Kearns, who operates one funeral home on Long Island and three in Queens, at the center of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, said most of the funerals he arranges are in West Indian, Guyanese, Jamaican and Trinidadian enclaves. Typical services draw large, extended families.

“The whole grieving process has kind of been interrupted,” he said, adding, “How do we tell families that you can only bring your close family in when your family has 37 people in it?”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention initially instructed funeral homes to limit participation at end-of-life services to 50 people. On March 29, it bumped that number down to 10.

Yet some states, including New Jersey, have all but ended funeral gatherings. Many funeral homes invite immediate family members inside only for a brief viewing — “They’re pretty much calling it an ID,” said Harvell, who is also vice president of the Garden State Funeral Directors Association.

The police are strictly enforcing these rules and have disrupted several large funerals in New York and in New Jersey.

The absence of traditional religious services, and the comfort and structure they may offer as families struggle to make sense of death, has been “devastating,” said Annmarie Rudolph, a funeral director at N F Walker of Queens Funeral Home in the Woodhaven neighborhood.

Compounding survivors’ sense of grief, she said, are rules barring most people from visiting loved ones at hospitals and nursing homes.

“They haven’t even been able to see them in their last moments of life,” Rudolph said. “And now they can’t even see them in death.”

That is the pain shared by Jenny Solomon, whose father, of Cranford, New Jersey, died after being released from one hospital, only to be readmitted days later to another when his condition deteriorated.

“The last I saw of him was being scared and being put into an ambulance,” Solomon, 34, said.

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Her father had likely contracted the coronavirus during a security training workshop for his temple, run by an instructor who later tested positive for the virus, his son said.

Solomon said she was haunted by thoughts of his final moments.

“One nurse specifically — she was great — held his hand,” she said.

“I’m just so angry that it wasn’t me.”

She had taken care of her father while he was at home, leaving her exposed to the virus. That meant she and her mother, who has since recovered from the illness, were unable to attend the burial.

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

She was not eager, she said, to watch the videotape her brother made of the graveside service.

“It’s just me and my mom,” she said last week while she was under self-quarantine, “and I can forget about it for a little bit since it’s not quite real.”

(BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Hari P. Close II, president of the National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association, a group of about 1,500 traditionally African American funeral homes, said the barriers to mourning created by the virus could lead to an unhealthy delay in the grieving process.

His funeral home in Baltimore is offering online services, as well as opportunities for people who cannot enter the funeral home to tape a remembrance outside. The memories are transferred to discs and given to the family.

Still, it is impossible to replicate the intimacy of a final kiss or the embrace of a fellow mourner.

“Now you’re sitting in the front row, literally, by yourself,” Close said.

“There’s a loneliness: ‘I’m burying my child and there’s no one to support me in this moment.’”

(END OPTIONAL TRIM.)

Funeral homes, like hospitals and nursing homes, are also struggling with shortages of the protective gear that is required to move and handle remains. Many bodies leave hospitals in what are known as disaster pouches, double-sealed plastic bags.

For funeral homes, even a final act — delivering cremated remains to relatives of patients who died of COVID-19 — requires extreme caution, Rudolph said.

“We would probably let them know that we have them and maybe deliver them to their front steps and say, ‘I’m here. I’m outside your door,’” she said, “and walk away.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .