After 25 years as a funeral director, George Lopes has become adept at comforting the grieving.
But in the age of COVID-19, new questions have emerged for “last responders” like him: How do you comfort families who can’t say a proper goodbye to their loved ones before — or after — they die and, in the end, who comforts the comforter?
From last March to May alone, Lopes and the staff at his Mattapan and Brockton locations handled the funerals of 200 COVID-19 victims.
“When you see that many people die and you’re doing five funerals a day, it feels like you’re in a war, a war against some unseen enemy,” he said. “We practice and prepare, but never at that volume. I didn’t know what the world was turning into. But at the end, we have to put on our professional hats to serve those who put their complete confidence in us.”
For Lopes and his staff, the task has been daunting, particularly in the early days of COVID-19, when little was known about the disease, when personal protective equipment could be hard to come by, and when even families who’d been unable to say goodbye to their loved ones in person before they died were often afraid to do so after their deaths.
“In the beginning, we didn’t know if we should have open caskets,” Lopes said. “Families themselves were scared.”
The mourning also often found they couldn’t give their loved ones the kind of funeral they wanted.
The majority of houses of worship have been closed for most of the last year, not only in Boston, where 1,295 people had died of COVID-19 by Wednesday, and Brockton, where the death toll as of that day stood at 407, but statewide.
“People felt like they were robbed of that last rite,” he said.
The maximum number of people Massachusetts funeral homes could allow in has ranged from as few as 10 at one point last year to 40% of a home’s capacity today, when the number of coronavirus cases Lopes has to handle has dwindled to a few per month. But mourners nevertheless often have had to wait in long lines.
How to comfort them sometimes comes not so much in what Lopes says, but in what he doesn’t say.
“Silence is sometimes the best friend to comfort,” he said. “Not saying anything may be better than saying too much, because only that person feels and knows the level of grief they are experiencing.”
Still, being that close daily to people in anguish has taken its toll on Lopes and his staff.
“It’s been painful for us to watch,” he said. “This past year was the first I went from empathy to sympathy. I cried quite often.”
Carol Williams, executive director of the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association, said that reaction is not uncommon among the group’s 1,200 members.
“This pandemic is hitting home everywhere: family members, coworkers, church pastors. Funeral directors have to deal with them all,” Williams said. “It’s lonely. A lot of our members are overworked and tired. Some have had so many dying of COVID, they’ve had to work with other funeral directors because they just don’t have enough space.”
For comfort, Lopes has drawn on three things. One is his 5-year-old son, George Jr.
“Being able to hug him daily and tell him how much I love him, and for him to tell me how much he loves me,” he said. “I also dug deep into my soul, my faith and my purpose, and knowing that I was able to bring some measure of comfort and closure for families.”
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To one funeral director, nothing prepared even ‘last responders’ for the coronavirus - Boston Herald
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