In the funeral directors, “there were sacrifices of facts but not at the expense of the deceased”

Officially in France, 100,000 people have died from Covid-19 in just over a year. If a part of its people would have died without the pandemic, there has been, in France, for a year, a very clear excess of mortality.

A very complex situation to manage for reasons of logistics but also of dignity for funeral directors. Juliette Cazes, independent researcher in thanatology, author of Funeral! (Editions du Trésor) on funeral rites around the world, was in full training in a funeral service during the first two waves of the epidemic. She tells 20 minutes how its structure must have been organized.

How the funeral directors faced the health crisis and its waves of deaths?

First you had to define what to do. We had a lot of contradictory information, we did not know which protocol to apply. Normally, we already have protocols for diseases and we did not know whether we should rely on this type of reference or wait for something else. We were therefore groped. Then, we had to face the first waves of deaths. The atmosphere was really strange because sometimes there was a line of hearses in front of the hospital when we went to look for bodies, given the number to be recovered. From a logistical point of view, it was difficult: usually the deceased first go to the fridges in the funeral chamber. Only, the deceased Covid were directly put in beer, that is to say in the closed coffin, in the hospital. It is not the same thing to store coffins, especially since there are individuals in them… So we must find solutions so that everything is done as respectfully as possible. But the question of the place quickly arose: we could condemn a funeral home, two, but not three to welcome the “non-Covid” dead and their relatives. It could happen that there were several coffins per living room while waiting for the families to come.

Do you think that at the height of the crisis, the deceased were not treated with the necessary dignity, for lack of resources and space?

I do not believe. Our job is still to respect the deceased from A to Z, that, we do not lose our mind. I would say the sacrifices were made for us funeral directors. For example, when there were no longer any individual protective stocks: there are times when we were less protected. Unfortunately we had no other choice than the D system. There were sacrifices of facts, I hear that everywhere, but always at the expense of our protection, not at the expense of the deceased.

Have you been helped during this difficult time to manage?

We have been a profession that has been largely ignored by official statements since the start of the pandemic. The funeral directors are also on the front line since we are going to look for the bodies: whether they are contaminated or not, we are still in the field. However, the profession does not benefit, for example, at all from the same things as the nursing staff, for example in relation to nurseries or childcare.

There were specific rules for the management of the dead from the Covid which, as you said, were directly put into beer. So we couldn’t see the bodies. Was it difficult to manage with the families?

Yes very difficult. Because seeing the body allows death to be certified, it is an important step for a family. Often, when you do not see the body of a deceased one can imagine many things that are not realistic. We ask ourselves questions: what happened to him? How was he treated?…. Presenting the body is reassuring. However, in some cases, families have not even been able to say “the last goodbye” in the hospital, and it goes directly from the memory of the person alive to the closed coffin: it is very violent. We had to help people to truly ritualize mourning, whether religious or not, to accompany them twice as much in a very difficult context. Even for us it was different: it was also strange to work with closed coffins. We did not have the same contact as usual with the deceased, even though we had seen them when they were put in the coffin.

Many people have been deprived of at least part of their mourning by being unable to attend a funeral or reunite with relatives of a missing person. Does being deprived of this “event” increase the mourning or does it erase it a little?

We can still attend funerals today, but it is true that there was a period of uncertainty when we did not know if we could go to cemeteries, if they were open… There was a upheaval: as I said, going from a living person to the coffin stage without being able to see them again is very complicated. We had to learn to ritualize differently and that’s very new for us. In history, we have a lot of grief that took place without the body, there are even a lot of examples, and I think we are in a similar case here, where this step is missing. I do think, however, that what is happening right now will force us to find new ways to ritualize mourning. We are on fairly traditional models, but this epidemic means that many people who were not faced with death in their daily lives are now. It makes us think about our death and that of others. For the moment we do not have enough perspective of course: people who lost a loved one last year are perhaps still in mourning today. So it is still difficult to see what impact the pandemic will have on our mourning rituals.