"There's going to be a lot of unresolved grief": How Covid-19 funerals have upended traditions

“I’ve cried a lot,” says Amanda Dalby, a funeral worker in Halifax, West Yorkshire. “I don’t usually! It unprofessional—it’s not my loved one. But during the pandemic, I couldn’t help myself. It’s been a traumatic experience.”

Soon after lockdown began in March, Park Wood Crematorium in Halifax announced that no mourners would be allowed to attend cremation services. This decision was swiftly reversed following objections by clergymen and funeral workers, but mourners (limited to ten) were still not allowed to enter its chapel for the funeral service for several weeks in April and May.

“There was one 85-year-old woman who had sit outside in the cold, as a service was conducted for her husband of 62 years,” Dalby says.

Halifax has been left relatively unscathed during the pandemic, Dalby tells me, but Covid-19 has still impacted every aspect of a funeral and the grieving process. “It’s so devastating seeing ten people in a chapel mourning a loved one, all socially distancing,” she says. “They’re sobbing and just looking at each other.” “There's going to be a lot of unresolved grief" she continues.

“What I’ve started doing is putting my hand to my heart, and then putting it back down” says Katrina Wagstaff at The Cornish Funeral Company. “I guess it like a form of sign language—just to show that we’re thinking of them.”

“We’ve got one hand behind our backs,” says Wagstaff’s husband, Terry. “When we collect a body, we go in with full PPE. We come in with white suits and it’s all very scary and impersonal.”

As owners of a relatively new company, Katrina and Terry pride themselves on providing a service that is more personal and less restricted by tradition. Of the 200 or so funerals they have done since opening, only eight have used a hearse. But while they used to discuss funeral plans at someone’s home over a cup of tea, it is now all conducted over the phone. “Sometimes you feel like a cog in the machine, and like we’re just body disposers” says Katrina.

Ali (not her real name) works in a crematorium in the South of England. She says that her team have had an average of two extra cremations a day for the past few months. “There are some days when I start work at 8am, and I don’t get at home till half eight at night,” she says.

The crematorium has removed all hymnbooks from the chapel and instructed loved ones to wait in their cars before the service begins, she continues. One of the most difficult aspect of her work has involved telling mourners that they cannot bring more people to the service than the rules allow. “It’s quite hard to say to someone: I’m really sorry, but we can’t allow it. It just makes the grieving process that much more difficult,” she says.

One of most tricky aspects of organising funerals has been the devolved way the government set out its regulations during lockdown. Contrary to popular belief, the government has never set a limit on the number of mourners at a funeral. Instead, they said that funerals should be limited to close family members, and let respective councils decide for themselves on what number was best.

Like Park Wood Crematorium, a handful of cemeteries in Leeds and Bradford closed their premises for cremations to all mourners for several weeks. At the same time, some councils in the south of England were allowing up to 10 people to attend.

David Collingwood, the Director of Funerals at Co-op Funeralcare, says he is proud of the way his colleagues have tackled the crisis. He says that, unlike several funeral homes in New York—which were quickly overwhelmed and started putting bodies into trucks— funeral homes in England have not lost sight of the dignity of the deceased.

However, he has still had to make a lot of difficult decisions. Co-op, the largest funeral directors in the UK, have not allowed the loved ones of those who have died from Covid-19 to actually see the body; this practise is followed by several other funeral homes. There are fears that the airborne disease may still be contagious.

Talking to people who deal with death on a daily basis, one thing becomes evident. No matter how hard I try to make the story about them and their experiences, their focus is solely on the families that they support.

“No matter how hard this pandemic has been on us, it is nothing compared to those who have lost loved ones,” says Collingwood. “We have to do everything that we possibly can to help.”