Kelly Liddycoat, owner and funeral director at Bocchinfuso Funeral Home on Regent Street, says Covid-19 has made a sometimes difficult job even more complicated. “I don’t think that anybody on a given day really knows what they need in the circumstance (of death) and to then have to throw in the complications of restrictions and lockdowns….We are going to have a really complicated grief period as a society coming out of this,” says Liddycoat.
When Covid-19 first hit, funeral services at Bocchinfuso Funeral Home came to a complete standstill.
“We were extremely limited,” says Liddycoat. “At the very beginning we were not offering services because we did not know what was allowed and there was concern about infection.”
When things finally opened up again it was difficult to stay on top of the ever-changing restrictions.
Says Liddycoat, “While we are governed by the province of Ontario, we are also governed by the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, and they are the ones that put into place the restrictions for the funeral-related industry. So we needed to wait until they gave us specific instructions about what needed to happen within our building before we could adapt.”
But Covid-19 didn’t only have logistical consequences, it also had emotional ones.
“The emotional impact of it was so difficult,” says Liddycoat.
“We tried as much as possible to accommodate, to get people what they need. We have had families who left off having services to a time where the restrictions were less but at the same time we are also trying to give them some type of formality to recognize the loss at that time because emotionally that’s also required.”
But putting off a funeral service can also mean it sometimes never ends up happening.
Says Liddycoat, “There are people who had the burial take place and who were planning to have a larger celebration of life at a later date and probably won’t now, because too much time has passed and it’s very, very difficult to pull that band-aid off again.”
Still, Liddycoat says she is hopeful about the future. “Things are getting a little bit easier with the reopening. There are still restrictions in place of course, but it’s getting easier for sure.”
