LONDON (AP) – Funeral director Hasina Zaman recently helped a family say goodbye to a 30-year-old man who had died of COVID-19 on the same day he planned a service for a husband and wife , both also lost viruses.
Since the pandemic occurred, Zaman’s phone has rarely stopped ringing, with distressed people seeking help that he is not always able to provide.
“Every week I think I don’t have what it takes,” said Zaman, whose company Compassionate Funerals serves a multicultural and multi-faith community in East London. The small business usually organizes about five funerals a week, but COVID-19 has reached as many as 20.
“We just do it,” Zaman said. “Literally, you just have to take a practical approach and go and do it. And it is not sustainable. It’s definitely not sustainable, because it’s not healthy. “
Funeral staff are under pressure in many places, but the load is especially heavy in Britain, where more than 115,000 people have died from the virus, one of the highest per capita death rates in the world. Funerals, embalmers, and other people who deal with death for a living often feel that the pressure on them is less important than the pain families feel in grief. But many are exhausted by the large amount of mortality they have suffered and the pandemic raises awareness that their own mental health also deserves to be addressed.
Funeral directors across the country describe a heavy burden stemming from more services, tougher hygiene measures and less staff due to illness and personal isolation needs.
Emma Symons, embalmer for Heritage & Sons Funeral Directors in north-west London, says her work has tripled.
“Some days it’s relentless and it’s really hard, especially if we have younger people who have died,” he said. “Sometimes it really gets a little too much.”
The parent company Heritage & Sons says its funeral home in the south-east of England organizes 30% to 50% more funerals than in a regular year. Ben Blunt, senior funeral director at Heritage & Sons, says the increase this winter (which saw Britain record more than 30,000 coronavirus deaths in January alone, although cases and deaths are now declining), it has been even worse than last spring’s peak.
“At the first closing, we didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “But having had the experience for the first time and now we’re going through it for the second time, there’s a little bit of fear that we almost know what’s on the horizon.”
Alison Crake was more prepared for the pandemic than most. Before anyone had heard of COVID-19, he wrote a guide on how to plan a pandemic for Britain’s National Association of Funeral Directors. Crake anticipated some of the tensions that could cause a pandemic, including staff absences, scarcity of mortuary space, and the need to purchase additional protective equipment.
But he says that if anyone had described the magnitude of the death and the disruption that would come, “I probably would have longed to think about it.”
Crake, who runs his family’s funeral home in the north-east of England, says the profession has been shaken by closed places of worship, strict limits on attendance at funerals and other restrictions to curb the spread of the funeral. virus, which means funeral staff can’t always complain. to families the comfort they desire.
Sensitively speaking to a grieving family for Zoom is a delicate new skill that funeral directors have had to learn. Blunt says it’s painful not to be able to do something as simple as shake hands with a customer.
“We’re professionals,” he said. “But we are also human beings.”
Still, Crake says funeral staff, who often consider their profession to be a call, may be reluctant to seek help, even though some in the industry are trying to change that. The guide he wrote was updated in October with a greater emphasis on providing emotional support to employees. Those in distress can call Our Frontline, a service created during the pandemic, partially funded by Prince William and his wife Catherine’s Royal Foundation, which provides all-day mental health care to key workers. Funeral staff has been included in this category, along with doctors and emergency services.
“We understand that this is the profession we have chosen,” Crake said. “And for many of us we see it as vocational. We consider ourselves part of our community and our community is part of us. But it is also necessary to achieve this balance to ensure that this prolonged exposure to trauma does not lead to compassion fatigue. “
Conservative lawmaker John Hayes, who heads a parliamentary group on funerals and mourning, recently paid tribute to the “quiet dignity” of funeral workers during the pandemic, saying his essential work “often goes unnoticed in the aisles. of power “.
Zaman is distressed by travel and meeting restrictions that make families often unable to mourn together. On one last day of the week, the bad guys stayed in the rain in front of their living room, in turns, to enter to pray social distances over the coffin of a young man who had died far from his native land of Gambia. Praise was given to the sidewalk over the rumble of cars and buses.
But she is proud of how the profession has adapted since the first wave of the outbreak. The live broadcast allows friends and family to watch the funeral from afar. Thanks to the training and protection equipment, he can let Muslim customers wash and wrap the bodies of their loved ones before they are buried, according to Islamic practice.
Zaman says that when families can have that connection and catharsis, “you feel a sense of success” that makes stress worthwhile.
“I’m exhausted,” he said. “Sure. But I take care of myself… I recover. I have 10 hours to recover after work and at night, and then I come back here and continue.”
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Kearney reported from Aylesbury and Bletchley, England.