Being a funeral director in Zachary, Louisiana, means that sometimes your neighbor calls when he sees cars in the parking lot to ask, “Who died?”
Zachary, a suburb of Baton Rouge, has about 18,000 inhabitants.
George Joseph “GJ” Charlet III and his three brothers own one of Zachary’s two funeral homes. During the coronavirus pandemic, they have found that their business, like many other funeral homes in small towns across America, has witnessed the disaster up close and personal.
The business has belonged to the Charlet family since its grandfather and brother opened it in the 1940s. Charlet is one of three funeral directors at the Charlet family funeral home. He grew up 20 miles north of Zachary behind another funeral home his family owns in Clinton, Louisiana, which was damaged by the historic August 2016 floods.
Because he was raised in a funeral home, Charlet knows how to prepare for the worst. From a very young age, he was taught to fill the fuel tank of the hearse before the graduation dance of the local high school, in case he had died from drunk driving accidents.
But even Charlet was unprepared for the Covid-19 pandemic. “The first two months were really scary because there wasn’t a lot of guidance on what we had to do,” he said. The lack of body bags meant that some bodies had to be wrapped in sheets.
There have been 552 coveted deaths in East Baton Rouge parish, where Zachary is located, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Health. The parish has had an average positivity rate of 10% in the last six weeks. Over the same time period, an average of 13% of the Covid-19 tests in the two census tracts that make up Zachary were positive for this.
There have been more deaths in the community because of Covid, but it has not overwhelmed the funeral home, Charlet said. They usually manage about five services a week. But since Thanksgiving has increased the death toll for Covid, he said. The funeral home serves for some of the deaths at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola. There have been 16 prisoner deaths due to Covid-19 in prison.
Charlet has an impression of an essay called Always Go to the Funeral by Deirdre Sullivan in a scrapbook he wants to read at his funeral. “Humans need this ritual of saying goodbye,” he said. “You have to acknowledge someone’s death.”
But his 80-year-old uncle recently caught Covid and is very ill. If she dies, Charlet does not want her mother to go to the funeral. “I want people to be more careful and take advantage of writing a letter of condolence,” he said. “It’s a strange place for me. It’s counterintuitive to my livelihood. “