OneRoom Blog

These are the most mournful times many of us have ever known, which makes our inability to mourn together frustratingly ironic. Directives from the nation’s governors that people help decrease the number of people dying by congregating in groups no larger than 10 mean that when people do die, we can’t gather to say goodbye to them. We can’t embrace their bereaved family members. Or join the rest of the community in providing a pot-luck feast.

YAKIMA, Wash. -- The Coronavirus pandemic is forcing many funeral homes to delay final goodbyes.

Over the last month, Richard Frieson has lost two sisters to COVID-19. In normal times, Frieson's large family would have gathered in Chicago, where his sisters lived, to sing, pray, hug and mourn.

In early April, Maura Lewinger, a mother of three from New York, told CNN about saying goodbye to her 42-year old husband over FaceTime as he died from coronavirus in the hospital. Unable to be with him at the bedside because of the danger, she, like thousands of others, faced the most difficult moment of her life, and that of her husband, separated by a screen and hundreds of miles. Lewinger is far from the only one who can tell this story. With the COVID-19 death toll in the United States at over 80,000 as of mid-May, we are witnessing an extraordinary onslaught of severe illness and death.

As COVID-19 cases spread across the nation, disrupting daily routines for the living, growing numbers of U.S. businesses and families are changing how they deal with the dead.

In a move away from tradition, more and more people are choosing cremation. Last year the cremation rate was predicted to have reached 53.5 percent, with a forward prediction that the national cremation rate will reach 80% by 2035.

If you died tomorrow, how many people would feel compelled to travel for your funeral, and how far would they have to come? It’s now fairly commonplace to leave your hometown and move across the country or abroad, at least for a while, and to find your loved ones scattered across thousands of kilometres.

Thanks to the social networks, the world is smaller.Thanks to the social networks, we are able to socialise our own grief with loved ones, as one.