By Colman M. Herman
THE CALL CAME late at night a few weeks ago. It was my niece.
Given the hour, the news was bad of course. Her mother — my sister-in-law — had just been diagnosed with COVID-19 and had been transferred from the nursing home, where she had been living with Alzheimer’s, to the hospital.
Of course, we were not allowed to visit her at the nursing home or the hospital.
Every time my niece called with an update, my heart skipped a beat when I saw her number on the caller ID.
My 85-year-old sister-in-law died last week, alone, in her hospital room. I wondered what she was thinking as she moved in and out of lucidity.
The funeral arrangements were strange to say the least. Only six people were allowed to go to the funeral home. There was no ceremony allowed.
In a very un-Jewish manner, there was an open casket. I was the only one who chose not to look at my sister-in-law’s lifeless body. I didn’t want that to be my last image of her. My niece shared with me that her mother’s face had greatly deteriorated since she last saw her in the nursing home.
Three cars were allowed to go to the cemetery. There we encountered four graveside attendants wearing HAZMAT suits. “This is awful,” my niece cried out.
We could not go to the graveside. We had to park on the roadside hundreds of feet from the grave, roll down the windows, and listen to the rabbi standing on the road extolling the virtues of God and my sister-in-law.
If these were ordinary times, we would have then gathered at a small catered event to celebrate her life. But these are not ordinary times, of course. We’ll do that when we get back to normal, whenever that might be.
Baker emotional on the need to say goodbye
By Bruce Mohl
With the state’s death toll about to go over 1,000, Gov. Charlie Baker became quite emotional on Wednesday talking about how the social distancing restrictions on gatherings he has put in place are depriving people of the chance to gather with friends to mourn loved ones.
Baker said funeral home operators called him when he first put the rules in place, saying “we were stealing the opportunity that families and friends would have to say thank you and goodbye….Honestly, that was one of the more brutal consequences just psychologically of this whole thing.
“So when people talk about the numbers, the first thing I think about is all those people. … My best friend lost his mom to COVID-19. He and his mom had a great relationship and because they had a great relationship they never left anything unsaid.
“That didn’t make up for the fact that this was an extraordinarily painful process for their family to go through this – the loss of a critical ritual that people believe in and hold on to that’s this chance to say goodbye.
“What I’m really thinking about is all those people who aren’t going to have a chance to say goodbye. I really hope people have a chance to make sure they don’t leave anything off the table with respect to their loved ones.
“My wife gives me a hard time all of the time that Baker men never really say what they think to anybody when it comes to personal things. Even on these goofy phone calls with my dad [who is in a long-term care facility], I try to say more because you just don’t know any more what the future is going to hold.”
