Although there have been zero COVID-19 deaths in Latah County, nearby funeral homes have had to adapt to health protocols and the methods used to address families.
Richard Lassiter, the funeral director at the Mountain View Funeral Home and Crematory in Lewiston, noticed people becoming nervous as COVID-19 regulations came into play.
“I could tell as soon as we sat down, the spouse, she was looking for someone to tell her we couldn’t provide services,” Lassiter said. “We did still provide services to them, it was just a matter of we could only provide to the direct family.”
Services now tend to consist of smaller groups with lower attendance. Lassiter said his funeral home has not had the need to enforce smaller groups in most cases.
For visitation, a gathering often before funeral and memorial services, the Mountain View Funeral Home has had to limit the number of family members allowed indoors.
Phil Hutton, the funeral director at Short’s Funeral Chapel in Moscow, has seen limited changes. In response to COVID-19, the chapel has not held memorial services indoors.
“Everything’s been done graveside,” Hutton said. “So we can social distance properly.”
Mark Kramer, the funeral director of Kramer Funeral Homes in Palouse, Washington, has seen smaller groups in place of previous large gatherings, like Lassiter mentioned.
“(Before) we would have well-known people that we’d have 150 or 200 people,” Kramer said. “It just doesn’t happen anymore.”
Kramer said families have been delaying services in hopes of COVID-19 case numbers improving.
All of this has led to a change in services to outdoor ceremonies with consistently small groups.
“We’ve had some graveside services with social distancing,” Kramer said. “People understand that as well.”
When the pandemic hit and began impacting Idaho, Lassiter’s main concern was the safety of the funeral home staff. If staff need to go elsewhere for work, they no longer enter buildings in some cases.
“We would meet someone at the door, transfer our gurney to them, and they would come out with the deceased already on the gurney,” Lassiter said.
This better ensures the heath of both the funeral home staff and of residents at the facilities the funeral home staff visit.
According to Lassiter, when transporting bodies from locations with known cases or deaths, staff are sometimes asked to wear additional protective suits.
“The nature of it wasn’t bloodborne, it wasn’t just fluid,” Lassiter said. “It’s something that can live out of the body, on the body.”
While Lassiter said the Mountain View Funeral Home is trying to abide by county rules, visitors who do not heed COVID-19 regulations can be a challenge.
“It’s not so much that they don’t believe (in COVID-19),” Lassiter said. “They’re hesitant to believe the greater impact and what that could mean.”
This disbelief can lead to unnecessary trouble for services, and most importantly, for families.
“Funerals are already stressful enough,” Lassiter said. “To try and create stress by going against what has been given to us by the mandates that we are supposed to uphold creates that much more stress.”
Kramer hopes people willbe more careful until the pandemic gets under control.
“I wish they would find a vaccine, and I wish people would be more concerned about other people’s safety,” Kramer said. “(Meanwhile) we treat everybody the best that we can and advise them the best that we can.”
This story has been updated to fix formatting issues.
Haadiya Tariq can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @haadiyatariq.