Recently, The Strand spoke with Jay Figures, a former funeral industry worker, about the condition of funeral homes and his own experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The government of Ontario has introduced general funeral industry safety measures during the pandemic, and funeral industry workers are included in Ontario’s second phase of the vaccine rollout.
Still, the pandemic has taken an immeasurable toll on funeral care workers and may change the industry for the foreseeable future. “Most of the trouble I’ve personally had and is part of why I had to leave, is that it’s been deeply traumatizing,” says Jay.
“Funeral directing is already a very physically and emotionally demanding job. Think of how people generally were impacted by the pandemic, only worsened by the isolation. A lot of people became depressed due to COVID. Now imagine going through all the things you already went through, and now your job is to be surrounded by the aftermath of the virus. Day in day out, surrounded by death. You could see the death rate in real time by how full the truck was. There is no real power to make the situation better… for us to fix the pandemic.”
A significant challenge of the pandemic has been the emotional strain imposed upon funeral care workers, says Jay. But funeral homes, in following the guidelines of their governing body, were uniquely prepared to respond to the pandemic: “Funeral homes were already highly regulated in regard to sanitation and preventing spread of disease by the BAO.”
“Generally, we are supposed to treat every case as an infectious case, always taking precautions like covering the face with a sprayed towel to prevent any aerosolization. Now we are treating every case like a COVID case… regardless of cause of death.”
Because of the relative safety of funeral homes for workers, Jay doesn’t believe funeral care workers should have higher priority for immunization than other essential workers. Despite this, the effects of confronting mass death during the pandemic have had serious emotional consequences for the entire industry. “The funeral industry is a very insular community,” Jay mentioned, which made hearing about virus hotspots especially difficult.
“In LA now where there is a lack of PPE, and of space, these funeral homes are overwhelmed without the capacity to handle this amount of bodies. In places where there is mass death… there was little to no government support, because to do so required recognizing mass death… I was working hearing horror stories of working conditions in hot zones. Thankfully, things weren’t truly dire [in Toronto], requiring government assistance with refrigeration or mass cremation. It’s clear that if that were the case, no one is coming.”
Jay believes that the pandemic poses unique problems for the future of the funeral industry and possibly the nature of grief. In his experience, many young people have been leaving the funeral industry throughout the pandemic, perhaps irreversibly moulding how funerals are conducted in Ontario.
“A large part of what I find interesting is how it will change funeral trends. More and more people have been becoming funeral directors; I don’t think that will continue being the case. A large amount of people in the same year as me have also given up on this industry because this has just been too traumatizing, and a lot of the types of jobs and funerals that existed before don’t now. Over the past decade, home funerals have become more and more popular and pushed for, but they’re kinda gone now. COVID has changed what funerals look like as they have become digital, and to some extent have changed how people have gone about grieving.”
