A North Shore funeral homeowner has seen it all since COVID-19 changed the funeral industry in one fateful week in March of 2020.
It’s been over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic changed the lives of nearly every human being on Earth.
One year of wearing masks, social distancing, losses of loved ones near and far and the unforeseen closure of local businesses.
Small businesses have faced extreme challenges since mid-March 2020 when the virus suddenly shut down public places in hopes of stopping the spread of the disease. Many local shops, restaurants and other services were forced to close early on or severely struggled to remain open in the spring and into the summer.
Local businesses in Massachusetts, specifically Boston, have faced unprecedented closures over the past 12 months. According to data from December 2020 gathered by researchers at Harvard, there was a 44 percent decrease in the number of open small businesses in the city since the start of last year.
Through it all, there is one industry that has been able to stay alive during the pandemic: funeral homes.
Massachusetts’s Essex County, which houses the majority of North Shore cities and towns, has seen 2,316 deaths due to COVID-19 over the last year. It would be easy to make the assumption that funeral homes have thrived due to the extremely high number of deaths by COVID-19 on the North Shore. However, this would be inaccurate.
The owner of F.S. Roberts & Son Funeral Home in Rowley, Massachusetts, has been able to keep his business open. However, not without financial hardships.
“Although the number of deaths has increased, the financial aspect decreased due to families not selecting traditional services,” said owner Jeff Megna.
It’s easy to think that funeral homes have made an influx of money due to the high number of deaths across the United States and the world. While many funeral homes have been able to stay open due to the increase in deaths and clients, it does not mean that they have seen more money come in.
The CDC highly encourages virtual funerals or funeral setups which are spaced out and generally untraditional as they recommend not going within six feet of others as well as wearing masks to prevent droplets from spreading in the air. Because of this, funeral homes need to make difficult choices that put the safety of others before their business. This means discouraging large gatherings of people from various cities and states, limiting capacities at funerals and using different venues that allow for proper spacing that many would often not choose to hold a funeral, such as an outdoor area.
Because these rules are strongly advised to be followed, depending on the area, law enforcement may force the funeral to end abruptly if it is found that the venue and the individuals are not following CDC guidelines. Therefore, funeral homes and their clients are opting to hold atypical funerals whether they be virtual or the number of people attending is very limited.
There were and still are months where I’m scrambling to pay the mortgage and salaries.
While Megna’s funeral home still offers some traditional services that follow CDC regulations, many families have decided against this approach for safety and personal reasons or have been told that they are not allowed to hold the funeral they desire. Some families that were arranging funerals decided to instead cremate their loved ones or wait until the world goes back to normal to have a gathering on their own.
Cremation services pertain little to actual funeral homes as they utilize outside resources to complete a cremation for a family. Therefore, Megna’s funeral home, like many others, has lost significant revenue.
“There were and still are months where I’m scrambling to pay the mortgage and salaries,” said Megna.
Not only has the pandemic taken a financial toll on funeral industry employees, but also an emotional toll. Megna has done his best to emotionally support an unprecedented amount of grieving families since March of 2020 and the weight of knowing what they have endured has impacted him. Megna can identify an instance in which he was emotionally affected more than usual during the pandemic.
“There was a family of an eighteen-year-old boy who went to the hospital, was tested, and told that he was negative for COVID-19, he was sent home and died during the night,” said Megna. “Obviously, the family was distraught. At the time, they could not see him nor could they have any services, and so he was cremated.”
Stories like that one are common among thousands of families on Massachusetts’ North Shore. Funeral homes typically do all of the work with a deceased individual, from picking up their body initially all the way to their final burial and everything in between.
Due to the inability to hold traditional funeral services, the funeral home’s role in assisting families with the passing of their loved one has significantly decreased and forced families to abruptly say goodbye to the individual via cremation without holding a traditional funeral or other services of any kind. The funeral home merely picks up the body of the individual and contacts the cremation service to have them take the body for cremation and, if the family chooses to, the funeral home can write and disseminate the obituary. The cremation service makes much more in profit than the funeral home under the pandemic and has contributed to a struggling funeral industry desperate for some form of normalcy to return.
Megna feels that a lack of public support from the state of Massachusetts and the country has contributed to the funeral industry’s extraordinary difficulty to remain upright. He specifically noted that Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has done little to nothing to acknowledge the tireless efforts of funeral owners, directors, embalmers and other employees in caring for the deceased during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Funeral industry employees were not considered health care workers under Baker’s administration and are therefore not allowed to get the vaccine until the general population is allowed to, which is expected to happen between April and June of 2021. Baker went as far as to allow the Massachusetts Medical Examiner’s staff to get vaccinated but deny accessibility to the funeral industry.
Outside of F.S. Roberts and Son Funeral Home in Rowley, Massachusetts
This frustrates Megna greatly and makes him feel that he and his staff’s efforts during the course of the pandemic are entirely unappreciated by the state. The media has publicly praised and thanked a plethora of essential industries such as health care, grocery clerks and even garbage collectors, but has voluntarily chosen not to recognize the acts of funeral employees.
“If it were not for the funeral industry caring for the deceased, particularly with COVID-19 bodies, he would have numerous nursing homes, hospices, hospitals and the State Medical Examiner’s office inundated with bodies,” said Megna.
Megna’s funeral home has been in business for 181 years and has never before been so close to closure. Despite the business having witnessed the cholera outbreaks in the mid-1800s, scarlet fever outbreaks in 1858, typhoid fever outbreaks in the early 1900s, the Spanish Flu of 1918, polio outbreaks, measles outbreaks and so many more United States health crises, Megna believes that it hasn’t ever seen a pandemic handled so poorly.
Nonetheless, by furloughing certain employees for a period of time in the beginning of the pandemic, he was able to keep his staff and bring them back when restrictions began to ease up at the end of 2020. His entire staff is not working nearly as much as before as the only employees at F.S. Robert and Sons who worked for the entire pandemic was Megna and his other director/embalmer. Megna doesn’t know when his business will see a meaningful increase in revenue, but he hopes that normalcy is in the near future with the CDC’s recent adjustment in their social distancing guidelines, namely their new 3-foot rule from their year-long general 6-foot rule.
Megna is similarly hopeful that he and his staff along with the rest of the country and world’s funeral industry will soon be fully vaccinated and be able to resume their traditional funeral services as well as honor the countless lives lost during the pandemic.
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