OneRoom Blog

Global Funeral Streaming Leader OneRoom Leverages its Reliable Technology Beyond Funeral Chapel Walls

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.

THE LOSS OF A LOVED ONE can be difficult to deal with at any time. But in the era of COVID-19, when physical, or social, distancing is the norm, family and friends wanting to pay their last respects to the deceased face special challenges.

When Candida Rifkind got the call on March 14 that her Aunt Cecilia had died, she realized she couldn’t attend the funeral. The rapid spread of the coronavirus was making international travel more uncertain than ever. Just a day earlier, the United States had blocked most European visitors from entering its borders. Ms. Rifkind, an English professor who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, didn’t want to risk it. (Canada and the United States closed their borders to each other the next week.)

The coronavirus has forced public gatherings to be banned so no crowds at the footy, no weddings, conventions, concerts and other events. But what about a funeral? They can’t be postponed but the good news you can still pay your respects without being there in person.

Grace Druien is “kind of a professional funeral-thrower.”

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.

The service isn't meant to replace a traditional funeral. Instead it provides the opportunity for those that can't make it in person to attend explains David Lutterman with OneRoom Funeral Streaming.

The call came on January 2. It was early enough in the morning that Natalie Levy probably shouldn’t have been awake—she had recently left a high-stress job at a private-equity firm in San Francisco, and was determined to relax a bit—but her dog had woken her up.

We gave OneRoom CEO David Lutterman a little longer than an elevator ride to pitch his company, which is shaking up the traditional funeral industry with its live stream technology and slick branding.