JULY 30, 2020 | THE DEVIL STRIP

 

Dorene Sherman’s phone rings in the middle of the night. 

 

On the other end, someone asks for help. They’ve lost a loved one and don’t have the money to pay for a burial or cremation, let alone funeral services that might cost thousands of dollars.

 

“We had a lot of people googling us and calling us from around the country,” Sherman says. “I was getting a lot of calls from Florida in the beginning. A lot of calls from Florida asking for help — that they lost their mother or they lost somebody.” 

 

Now, those late-night calls aren’t so unusual. But Sherman says the noticeable spike has been unnerving — an ominous mark of how devastating COVID-19 has been for families already struggling with health disparities and limited economic opportunities.

 

Sherman founded The Final Farewell Project in 2017 as a way to assist families with the cost of burial and funeral services. She says she operates the small non-profit organization from her desk at home, working directly with families to help plan and pay for funeral, burial or cremation services. Since 2017, The Final Farewell Project has assisted 24 families in paying for a loved one’s final expenses, which Sherman says fills a sizable gap in resources for families facing an unexpected death with little or no savings.

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But since the spring, instead of getting two or three calls every month, Sherman has been getting multiple calls per week. Over and over, people told her that their loved ones had died of COVID-19, or that they’d lost their jobs as a result of the virus and couldn’t help pay for a loved one’s final arrangements. 

 

“We never ask about people’s past,” she explains. “We never ask how [the person] died. We don’t dig into family issues. That’s not our role. That’s not why we’re here. We help people who just don’t have any other way to pay,” Sherman says. “And we’re here to help anybody.”

 

There are major gaps in the systems designed to assist families with the financial burden of burial and funeral services, and Sherman says plenty of families fall through the cracks. 

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Born into the business

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At Sommerville Funeral Services, Funeral Director Margo Sommerville says she’s worked with many such families over the last 20 years. Sommerville was born into the business. Her father, Marco, opened Sommerville Funeral Services in 1978. In 2001, Margo took her father’s place as funeral director. 

 

Sommerville says that as a kid, she watched her dad build and provide community-centered funeral services with patience and compassion.

 

“He probably gave away more funerals than people paid for,” she says. “But that’s what we do. We’ve always been in the business of helping people.”

 

Sommerville sits on The Final Farewell Project’s Advisory Board, and says the kinds of care and service the project provides are absolutely crucial for families facing an unexpected death coupled with a financial crisis.

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Most Americans can't afford funeral services — especially when a death occurs unexpectedly

 

Full funeral service costs can average anywhere between $7,000 and $12,000, says Sommerville — a sum that most Americans aren’t prepared to pay in the event of an unexpected death. Between March and April, Summit County’s unemployment rate nearly tripled. And while those numbers fell slightly in May, Ohio’s economic instability is poised to have a lasting effect on already vulnerable communities. 

 

For Black families, footing the bill may be even more difficult. Black Akronites have already been affected by disparities in access to healthcare, educational opportunities, and generational wealth. Discriminatory policies and practices in housing and employment have made Black Akronites more likely to contract COVID-19 than white Akronites, to be hospitalized for treatment and to die from the virus. 

 

“When we started [The Final Farewell Project], I really had no idea what demographics we’d be helping,” Sherman says. “But we’ve noticed that over the last three years, of all the families we’ve helped, three [have been] white families.” The rest, Sherman says, have been Black or Latinx.

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Sommerville says that Sommerville Funeral Services has served about 15 families that have lost a loved one to COVID-19.

 

“We are doing funerals differently than we’ve ever had to. We’ve had to get creative [and] inventive to really help families through this very difficult time,” Sommerville explains. “Because you still want to allow families to have the opportunity to celebrate the life of their loved one, to grieve, but in a way that is safe. And that’s been the challenge.”

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Changing the way we grieve

 

In the chapel at Sommerville Funeral Services, every second pew is marked off with a thin rope. Individual chairs are spaced evenly across an otherwise empty room. 

 

Sommerville walks down a carpeted aisle and turns a dim corner. She taps an index finger against a thin plexiglass shield. This tri-fold barrier is designed to help musicians control volume levels while performing onstage. But when Sommerville spotted the shield, she saw a solution — a firm, transparent barrier to position around the casket during public viewings. Sommerville says the barrier helps keep family and friends from touching the deceased.

 

Sommerville says the virus has robbed families of the time and space to properly grieve. 

 

Once a person is hospitalized with COVID-19, they may spend anywhere from a few days to several months lying in a hospital bed, with limited human contact.

 

“You have a loved one who is literally on their deathbed alone,” Sommerville says. “And when we think about that — particularly when we think about [mourning] in the African American community — typically what we do is come to the bedside.”

 

“We want to be able to love or touch just that one last time, and COVID has removed that for families,” Sommerville adds. “Even when they come here after their loved one has passed, we still can’t allow them to have that last touch. Because we have to make sure that we’re safe.”

 

Researchers know relatively little about how long COVID-19 survives in the body after death, which means that families can’t grieve in the same ways they did before the virus.