This is part 1 of a two-part series. Next week in Islander: Cremation capacity strained as B.C. considers alternatives
When Kelsey Martin’s mom, Kathy, succumbed to cancer in late March 2020 at the age of 62, the COVID-19 pandemic was in full swing and the province was scrambling to contain the novel virus.
Strict social-distancing requirements prevented the Martins from hosting a ceremony for the large community of friends, neighbours and coworkers who wanted to acknowledge Kathy’s life, Martin said.
Martin, together with her three siblings and now-widowed father, got permission to host a burial.
A small number of immediate family members and close friends stood on marked Xs spaced out widely across the lawn of the graveyard.
When the burial was over, everybody was instructed by graveyard staff to leave. There could be no hugging, no sharing of stories, no opportunity to really talk at all.
“It was such a weird time,” Martin said.
“We weren’t able to do social aspects around the funeral … socializing with people that knew her through different walks of life. I think that part of the funeral, which is kind of the biggest part, was totally unable to be done.”
The Martins always planned to host a larger celebration for Kathy when pandemic restrictions eased, she said, “but COVID kind of lasted longer and longer, and then it kind of lost a bit of momentum.”
It wasn’t until four years later, in the spring of 2024, that the family decided to host the celebration of life, in no small part because community members kept asking, Martin said.
“Other people started asking as well, not just our family,” Martin said.
They planned a celebration of life at a golf course near their home in West Vancouver. Four years after Kathy’s death, 160 people showed up to her service.
Martin said that throughout the evening and in the days that followed, she and her family had several conversations and received numerous messages from people from Kathy’s life, expressing how appreciative they were of finally having an opportunity to properly grieve their friend.
“Everybody was really happy that they were able to be there and so glad we did something else that they could be a part of,” Martin said. “I think it meant more to those people in a way, because they felt like they hadn’t had anything at all.”
While the Martins’ experience was unique to the pandemic and not what they’d have wanted otherwise, it is reflective of a growing trend in North America.
Fewer Canadians have been hosting funerals in recent years, opting instead for cremation followed by long-delayed services, or no service at all.
Karla Kerr, a Victoria death doula and former funeral-home worker with more than 16 years’ experience in the death-care field in Alberta and B.C., is concerned that the trend toward long-delayed — or non-existent — ceremonies can have a negative impact on grieving families, and the wider community.
“Rather than having a ceremony and acknowledgement, and a slowing down and a chance for the community to grieve together, it’s very individualized,” Kerr said. “It’s just: ‘Let’s just try to get through this as quickly as possible.’ ”
Many experts attribute the decline to a combination of the rising costs of funerals, an overall decline in religion in Canadian society, or the desire to do something more personally reflective of the deceased individual.
The pandemic also had a significant impact on funeral rituals in the country. Many families who, like the Martins, lost loved ones during the pandemic were forced to delay the ceremonies due to social distancing.
But even when pandemic restrictions eased, the trend towards delayed ceremonies continued.
Kerr noted that, traditionally, a death would cause community members to stop what they were doing and prioritize grieving, mourning and ritualizing the event. Now, however, people often prioritize their schedules and prior commitments, delaying the ceremony until it is convenient for them.
“I just don’t think that there’s any reverence for slow and rest anymore, and not just to do with grief,” she said. “Slowing down can feel really lazy, it can feel really self-indulgent, and I think that might be part of it.”
Kerr said that although she doesn’t judge any family’s choices when it comes to death planning, she is concerned that a complete lack of ceremony, or ceremonies delayed for months or years, can have negative impacts on both the immediate family and on wider community members, who aren’t offered a space to grieve a friend alongside others.
In fact, a 2023 study by researchers at Simon Fraser University found that pandemic restrictions that prevented people from gathering to mourn led to a greater risk of developing Prolonged Grief Disorder, or “complicated grief.”
Complicated grief is intense grief that lingers long after the loss and affects a person’s daily life, said SFU communications co-ordinator Melissa Shaw in summarizing the research.
“These restrictions played a role in incomplete grieving and contributed to feelings of anger, guilt, depression and isolation,” Shaw wrote. “Feelings of guilt from being unable to say goodbye to a loved one has been shown to be an independent risk factor for complicated grief.”
The study said being susceptible to complicated grief was less about people’s ability to be present at the time of death, and more about their ability to talk with one another afterwards.
The research supports Kerr’s assertion that ceremonies help grieving families — and the wider community — process death in healthy ways by getting together, sharing stories, and meeting friends and acquaintances of the deceased.
“I think it can just be really lonely if you don’t do anything,” she said.
Embodied grief
In funeral school, Kerr was taught that to facilitate healthy grief, loved ones should witness the body of the deceased.
While she is supportive of cremation and doesn’t think witnessing the body is absolutely necessary, Kerr said she has noticed a worrying decline in ritual specifically among white Canadians, who in many cases are descended from Christian cultures, but no longer practising any form of religion or organized spirituality.
In many non-white, non-Christian cultures, by contrast, most of those rituals remain intact, said Kerr, who has observed members of the Muslim community who come to the funeral home to bathe the body before burial, and members of the Chinese community who partake in visitation in the days before burial.
“Indigenous people, they gather, they don’t always do the bathing, but there’s always something,” she said.
White Canadians, by contrast, are increasingly opting for cremation without witnessing the body, with no service at all to follow, Kerr said.
“I really think that we are generally lacking culture in terms of, how did our ancestors do things?” she said. “With us being a more secular society, there is less of that blueprint of what to do.”
Colin Benesch, a third-generation funeral director and manager of Earth’s Option Cremation & Burial Services in Langford, agreed that the world of the funeral has shifted a lot over the years.
“I find that folks nowadays want more personalized experience,” he said. “They don’t want the status quo. The status quo of having a viewing, having a church service, then having a burial after is archaic and it’s become a thing of the past.”
Benesch attributes much of the changing nature of funeral rituals to the changing nature of death itself.
Death used to be almost entirely unexpected and unpredictable, he said, whereas now with advancements in technology and health care, we tend to have a better grasp on predicting death within a reasonable timeline.
Death is now slower, he said — people are living longer with terminal illnesses, enabling their loved ones to spend time with them in hospital, hospice or at home before they die.
“They’ve had that final goodbye and that final send-off — they don’t need to come and do that again,” Benesch said.
He agreed that the pandemic accelerated the trend toward delaying services.
After COVID, it became almost the standard for families to wait about six months before hosting a celebration of life, he said. “I don’t see it being as much of a negative impact as some of my colleagues may,” he said.
Benesch argued that delaying ceremonies can provide benefits to families by allowing them ample time to organize the paperwork involved in death, organize travel plans for loved ones from out of town, and generally have time and space to “get themselves into a better head state” before having to think about planning a service.
The rising popularity of cremation has also reduced the urgency of memorials.
In a traditional burial, everything needed to be done quickly “because nature is going to take its course and things are going to get worse as time progresses,” Benesch said.
Once cremation is complete, by contrast, “the clock stops.”
Benesch said he welcomes the changes in the funeral industry, as he feels it allows for a lot more creativity and individuality in how people choose to grieve or celebrate their loved ones.
“The cool thing about cremation is that once they get the urn back, that’s just the beginning,” he said.
Through Earth’s Option, Benesch said, he’s facilitated a wide range of experiences for families, ranging from partnerships with golf courses to host celebrations, to a man who wanted to scatter his dad’s ashes while feeding fish.
“My kind of philosophy for our company is, I’m here to do anything and everything for a grieving family, as long as it’s legal,” he said.
However, Benesch was careful to draw a distinction between a delayed or creative ceremony and no gathering at all.
“Removing the ability to gather for grieving families is a detriment for grief,” he said. “COVID ruined that for a lot of folks.
“That’s going to be an impact we’re going to feel as a society for a long time.”
To celebrate or to mourn
While Kerr uses the words funeral, ceremony and celebration of life somewhat interchangeably while she’s speaking, she clarified that each can serve very different purposes depending on the circumstances surrounding the death.
While celebrations of life have become increasingly popular over the past decade, “there’s something to be said for a sad funeral,” she said.
Many Canadians are now living long lives and dying of age-related expected illnesses, but some, obviously, are not.
While Kerr understands many people’s desire to celebrate a life, she worries that the increasing emphasis on focusing on the positive can overshadow the very real grief that death creates.
“It is perfectly OK, especially in those first few days or weeks, to be like, ‘This is sad,’ ” she said.
Of the many funerals she’s been to over the years, Kerr said some of the best ones were not celebrations, but opportunities for mourning.
Often, people leave funerals in which crying is much more prevalent reporting a sense of catharsis that they don’t experience at more celebratory ceremonies, Kerr said.
“I think that’s really what’s getting skipped over,” she said. “Especially when it’s prolonged a long time.”
In her more recent work as a death doula, Kerr said she often encounters families who say they feel a ceremony would be indulgent because it wasn’t something the deceased wanted.
“What I hear a lot is: ‘Dad didn’t want a funeral, so we’re not going to do anything,’ ” she said. “And it’s like, yeah, but Dad’s gone. It is for you.”
Kerr said she’s come to gently suggest to families that, even if they don’t want to host a full-blown event, they should at least do some sort of ceremony to mark the passing, where as many community members as they are comfortable with are offered a space to grieve.
“Do something small, just to recognize the loss,” she said. “And to recognize that there is a hole now.”
