“Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the funeral home is at capacity and is unable to handle any new calls at this time.” T he words felt hollow and wrong as they left my lips, even after having to repeat them over and over again throughout the day. No matter how much I softened my tone, there was no easy way to share this information. I struggled to adjust to the incongruity between my instincts to provide reassurance against the devastating reality I needed to communicate to these already broken family members. For 16 years I have answered calls for funeral homes, but I have never imagined a day might come when I might have to tell grieving family members that a funeral home can’t serve them. Looking back now more than a month later, I still tear up when I think about answering calls during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. I can still hear the reactions of grieving family members from me telling them that I cannot help them. While some would respond with an onslaught of questions I was unable to answer, others would react with a sigh of resignation. It wasn’t hard to tell they had been trying for some time to find someone 20 www.ogr.org | Summer 2020 to take care of their loved one without any success. I think about these families often and the immeasurable weight of their grief. Losing someone you love is the most difficult thing we must endure, and to have that pain multiplied by the COVID-19 pandemic is truly heartache on another level. ASD answers calls for funeral homes across the nation, but during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic our answering service handled an influx of calls from New York City and other hot spots that were at the epicenter of the virus. Day after day, my heart ached for the grieving family members forced to call multiple funeral homes, the hospital or nursing home staff who couldn’t find anyone to pick up a body, and our clients, the funeral directors, who were completely overwhelmed. Many worked around the clock, sleeping in their cars— if at all, in an effort to respond to the non-stop incursion of death calls. When you think about being on the “front lines”, one usually envisions those who are physically responding to the pandemic, but there was also an invisible front line handling the emotional fallout caused by COVID-19. For ASD Call Specialists, the month of April was extremely difficult. For a period of time, ASD
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