Death is an essential part of the human condition. Credit: PIERO CRUCIATTI/AFP/
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Amanda started stockpiling a fortnight days ago. “My son thinks I’m panic-buying,” she said. “But it was just an extra six — I don’t have room for any more. I know someone who bought about 100 in his last order.” She feels a little embarrassed now, as the government has made assurances that supplies will not run out; but we shouldn’t blame her. There is no undertaker in the world who wants to tell a grieving family that they have run out of coffins.
We are not going to see a repeat of the Spanish Flu, where even the wood for the coffins ran out, and Italian-Americans buried their dead in the wooden boxes macaroni came in. Coffins are no longer made to order by tradesmen who split their time between undertaking and joinery, and the supply chains are robust.
But it is reasonable to ask whether their modern equivalents are ready for the predicted increase in deaths. There are concerns about shortages of masks and other protective equipment, both for the undertakers and the deceased — it is possible for a coronavirus victim to infect others, even in death, by expelling air when they are moved, and one coroner has advised crafting masks for them from towels or sanitary pads. It is hard to argue that living sufferers should not take priority over the dead; but that still leaves the undertakers vulnerable.
Funeral directors had been given no specific guidance from the government before a meeting with the Cabinet Office last week; even after that, it was unclear whether they would be classed as “key workers”, until the government was pushed by Carolyn Harris, a Labour MP who, having lost her son at a young age, is probably the most clear-headed person in Westminster on the provision of funerals.
When I started researching the death management process — to use the phrase favoured by the government’s pandemic planning documents — a few months ago, there were complaints about overcapacity. New private crematoria, for example, far from bringing down prices, reduced the number of cremations over which local authority facilities could spread their fixed costs, and in some parts of the country actually increased prices. The one advantage to this was that crematoria competed for market share not by price but with additional facilities — so the technology for live-streaming crematorium services is already widely available.
In other areas, overcapacity kept prices down: one of the reasons that funerals in Ulster are cheaper than the rest of the UK — you will notice that adverts for funeral plans generally have a footnote saying “based on prices in Northern Ireland” — is that many towns have a Catholic undertaker and a Protestant undertaker competing for the nonsectarian trade. Overcapacity was not so good for funeral directors, who complained about having to lay staff off, or give them zero-hours contracts, in order to cope with demand that could never be predicted. All of them were, of course, on call 24 hours a day, whether or not there was any work to do — and there often wasn’t.
The funeral directors I have spoken to do not expect a repetition of the scenes in Italy, where coffins are lined up in churches ready for burial, not least because the vast majority of people in the UK choose to be cremated. Italy has one of the lowest cremation rates in Europe — only Latvia and Lithuania are lower — for historical and religious reasons; even Venice, where burying the dead has been forbidden since Bonaparte’s occupation, only legalised the scattering of ashes nine years ago, and even then at least 700 metres into the Lagoon.
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SubscribeMedia vita in morte sumus. Very good piece Andrew, thank you.
Thank you for a good article which was approached from a welcomed pragmatic angle.
Last summer we became aware from conversations with elderly members of our family that crematoriums had a six week wait even at that stage.
We made the decision to separate the cremation from the wake, as having the disposal without family present meant there wouldn’t be a delay. We felt strongly it wasn’t fair on the family to wait 6 weeks or more to pay their respects.
For the next year probably right, but longer term no. And remember many religions still require burial as well as ceremony. As Ben Gummer argues in his excellent article, most things should return to normal when the crisis is over (except perhaps hand shaking). To put it harshly, we find a cure, or the small vulnerable proportion die off, or survivors gain immunity; we can’t live in lockdown for long.