Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • for those who pass away during this pandemic, there is this double whammy, so to speak.

  • You have to deal with loss of the love one first and foremost.

  • But then you have to grieve, often privately and without the close contact.

  • Comfort of family and friends across the globe, so many sacred and precious moments of consoling, grieving and paying tribute have been lost to social distancing.

  • Our David Wright has this report.

  • There's no funerals.

  • Serve two vital functions to honor the dead on dhe to console the living cove.

  • It 19 is disrupting both.

  • It's really wanted, really to be fair with her because we don't want her to be alone.

  • This is Teresa McCarrick, Mama Terry to her family.

  • Like thousands of others this week, she died alone of pneumonia.

  • Her Children and grandchildren, unable to give her one last hug because of strict social distancing, wanted to be with Mama Terry.

  • It was really hard.

  • Never got her.

  • Mama Terry's funeral sparsely attended a CZ well on Lee.

  • 10 family members were allowed to pay their final respects.

  • They'll had to wear masks and sit in separate pews.

  • Street is so high that was the only time we saw her and across the country the bodies keep coming now and have them on my desk where I could watch.

  • But I don't have that.

  • I don't have the accommodation again right now.

  • Pat Marm O's Funeral Home in Brooklyn is already at capacity.

  • I'm going to say at least 60% of them in this room of publication.

  • Same goes for just about every funeral parlor in Brooklyn.

  • It's really insane.

  • This is not how any firm generally operates, and it's kind of it's kind of exhausting.

  • Today we turn off our phones because we really can't handle any more phone calls.

  • Kendall Lindsey has been forced to turn dozens of families away in all her years.

  • She's never seen it like this.

  • 9 11 was that it really was bad, but it wasn't like this.

  • Every family directing we're talking to, they all have expressed how crazy it is.

  • Being a body collector during the black death has long been thought of as one of the most thankless jobs in human history.

  • Modern funeral directors now have new empathy for them.

  • It's not easy out here, you know I'm in.

  • I'm gonna be in this car now next, anywhere between eight and 12 hours.

  • Today, their work, like that of the health care workers, involves significant risks.

  • I'm treating everybody today that they have the virus.

  • I have to.

  • I have to.

  • Sheer numbers, especially this week in New York, have robbed death of its rituals.

  • Cultural values.

  • Another casualty to Corona virus thing.

  • This virus took religion out of the equation.

  • My poor families, the Christian families can't go to church is the Muslim families can't go the mosque.

  • The Jewish families can't go to start the temple.

  • Can't have people gather in Brooklyn, where Cove it 19 has ravaged the Orthodox Jewish community, many Hasidic Jews defied stay at home orders to mourn a prominent rabbi, drawing this rebuke from the governor.

  • I understand religious gatherings.

  • I understood staying the Orthodox community, a Jewish Orthodox community.

  • I'm very close to them on I have been for many, many years.

  • But now is not the time for large religious gathers.

  • The family of a man known as the dean of the civil rights movement, Joseph Lowery, was also recently forced to host a much smaller funeral than they ever envisioned.

  • Instead of a public gathering just a small private ceremony.

  • Covert 19 has changed the way we honor veterans to in small but significant ways.

  • A new addition to the uniform for all the participants as of Monday, Masks air required Even at Arlington National Cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky, Army veteran Robert Coleman's family set up an iPad to stream his field.

  • We didn't want to put Rooster my kids, so we just let them see the live stream and say a prayer with me what it is for the moment, John Coleman says.

  • He didn't mind the empty chairs.

  • The immediate family was all there, including his mom.

  • I wouldn't upset that couldn't have a ton of people here.

  • My dad would have cared anyway, is more or less the immediate that was here on.

  • We were all able to make it, so that made it a little easier honoring the dead and comforting the living.

  • A vital service.

  • Now, more than ever, we're all of us struggling to find closure.

  • David Wright, ABC News, New York Struggling to find closures in those open wounds lingering a little bit longer.

  • Hi, everyone.

  • George Stephanopoulos here.

  • Thanks for checking out the ABC News YouTube channel.

  • If you'd like to get more video show highlights and watch live event coverage, click on the right over here to subscribe to our channel.

  • And don't forget to download the ABC News after breaking news alerts.

  • Thanks for watching.

for those who pass away during this pandemic, there is this double whammy, so to speak.

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it