August 24, 2021
No contact funerals challenge for directors
A funeral director says social media is proving vital for bringing together grieving whānau as tougher level four restrictions put paid to in-person mourning.
Kaiora Tipene from Tipene Funerals says this time because of the nature of the Delta COVID variant whānau members can’t even come in to help dress the tūpapaku.
She says people seem a lot more receptive to the restrictions this time, but it puts more pressure on kaimahi who are acting on behalf of absent whānau.
“It’s those moments that become challenging for us, so we do our best to involve whānau by doing live streams with them. We are using social media as a form of communication, so we create private pages or the whānau has already created private pages – that’s where we do our live stream with them,” Ms Tipene says.
Many whānau Māori are asking for their loved ones to be embalmed and stored until they can be buried after the lockdown, while Pacific families prefer to conduct their mourning process remotely for the normal period and then allow the funeral directors to conduct the burial.
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