FINAL JOURNEY
Funerals have become hurried, lonely affairs as COVID-19 forces people to stay apart even at a time of grief and loss
Praveen Sharma, 26, (name changed on request) remembers his 57-year-old father’s last wish. It was to shave off his stubble. “My father was always clean shaven,” says Sharma from a quarantine centre in Howrah where he has been with his mother and sister since April 12. “He kept running his fingers through it and whispered that it was itchy. I had promised to shave it off once he returned from the hospital.” It wasn’t to be. Sharma’s father died of COVID-19 on April 14. He doesn’t know where his father was cremated. “My uncle and cousins were called to clear off the bills and from a distance they watched a couple of men in PPE (personal protective equipment) take the plastic-wrapped body away,” he says. “I don’t even know if they bathed him and made him wear new clothes for his last journey.”
The last journey now is a terribly lonely one for families. Death in the time of COVID-19 has necessitated that people stay apart at a time of profound grief. Many are not even allowed to see off their loved ones to the crematorium or the burial site, denying them the closure they desperately need. Social distancing measures ensure funerals are hasty affairs conducted with little, if any, family presence. “The regret I will live with is how we buried him,” says a man from Srinagar who lost his father. “Everything was done in a hurried way as if we wanted to get rid of him.” That only 10 people including the cleric could convene compounded his grief.
Fear of contracting the virus has resulted in unfortunate incidents in which the bodies of COVID-19 victims, including doctors who have died in the line of duty, have been denied a resting place. Like in the recent case of Dr Simon Hercules in Chennai whose family faced hostility from locals gathered at the Kilpauk cemetery. En route to another in Anna Nagar, the ambulance with Hercules’s body was attacked, forcing his wife and children to run. “He is in some distant graveyard all alone,” Anandi Simon, his wife, told India Today TV. In a similar case, after the death of Dr John L. Sailo Ryntathiang (see box), founder of Shillong’s Bethany Hospital and beloved for his charitable work, his family struggled for 36 hours to find a cemetery willing to take his body.