COVID-19 has had an indelible effect on most aspects of our day-to-day lives, and now funeral directors say the pandemic is affecting the way we deal with our dead.
Fears about contracting COVID at large gatherings, the cost of funerals and convenience are just some of the factors they say are driving a dramatic cultural shift away from traditional services.
Third-generation Bairnsdale-based funeral director Stephen Baggs said the catalyst was lockdowns and capacity restrictions imposed during the pandemic.
He described the difficulty of trying to organise dignified funerals for people within COVID-safe rules, while helping grieving families make the impossible decisions about who could attend a service.
"For many families, because they couldn't have more than 10 people in attendance, they chose to have no funeral service at all.
"We did an awful lot of direct cremations where no-one was in attendance and even a number of burials where no-one attended."
Mr Baggs said it was heartbreaking to see families denied the support they normally would have had from their communities.
"It was a particularly sad time when you had people, who had been very involved in the community with sports or business or politics, when they died, and sometimes even an eccentric local that everybody knows, and it happened at a time when only 10 people could attend a service."
e-funerals here to stay
The Australian Funeral Directors Association (AFDA) said 161,300 funerals were conducted in Australia each year, 72 per cent of which were cremations.
Mr Baggs said even though COVID restrictions had been lifted, people had developed a long-lasting apathy for organising events.
"You may not be good with words at telling people how you feel when somebody dies, but just your presence at a service, shaking hands with the family, even a nod conveys I'm here to support you and people know they're loved and considered at that time."
The long-term impact that pandemic orders have had on our social connections, cultural rituals, community cohesion and mental health is yet to be fully realised.
However as technological interaction continues to trump real-life interaction, Mr Baggs predicts a gradual extinction of the traditional coffin-centred funeral gathering and ceremony in favour of the "some kind of memorial service at a later date".
"Now many families are saying, 'Dad has actually decided he didn't want to have any service at all' ... I think in many ways it's not going to go back to the way it was."
Mr Baggs said technology had played a significant role in the evolution of the funeral industry, and younger generations were more inclined to offer condolences and commemorate a death on social media.
He said funeral directing was now less about organising flowers and obituary notices than being a media tech — coordinating audio and visual productions with catering, memorial photo booklets, slide shows and live music.
Two-thirds of Mr Baggs's funeral services are now streamed on the internet, allowing distant and time-poor mourners to tune in.
AFDA said between August 2021 and January 2022, 44 per cent of all funerals in Australia were live-streamed.
"Technologies and rituals emerging from COVID-19 point to new directions in Australian death culture and commercial activity that are particularly deserving of further attention," chief executive Dale Gilson said.
Bespoke, modern ceremonies
For people still opting to hold a funeral service, Mr Baggs said the heavily religious-based commemorations of the past had evolved to more customised events in which the deceased's life was celebrated in a way authentic to them.
"When I started work with Dad 45 years ago, family members rarely got up and spoke at the funeral," he said.
"Now, 50 per cent of the time the main members of the family, even the husband or wife of the person who died, feels moved to get up and talk at the service and tell us all what the person they loved meant to them.
"It's much more acceptable now for people to talk about it and express how they feel."
AFDA executive director Lucinda Cate agreed, saying funerals were becoming less religious and more spiritual rather than formal and structured.
"They are also becoming more individualised, more event-based, and for some it means no service, while for others it is a full-on celebration," she said.
Religious scripture had largely been replaced by the deceased's favourite music, Mr Baggs added.
Services are also often conducted at meaningful locations to the deceased, guests are sometimes invited to dress to a theme reflecting the deceased's interests or donate to preferred charities in lieu of flowers.
"We've had services at beaches, on blocks of land in the bush — fortunately no-one's asked us to don a wetsuit or jump out of an aeroplane to conduct a funeral yet," Mr Baggs said.
There are also endless options for cane caskets, eco caskets and the opportunity for coffins to be painted and decorated with everything from roses and fluffy white clouds to football colours and hotted-up vintage cars.
Yet, Mr Baggs said well over 95 per cent of people chose a conservative, traditional wood or wooden-looking burial coffin for their loved one.
"People have become more aware as consumers and will tell you exactly what they want," he said of a contemporary inclination towards modesty and budget over flamboyance and expense.
A hands-on approach to grief
In pioneer times, rural families would typically keep their loved one lying in state in the front room or parlour of the family home, where they would wash and dress the body in preparation for burial on the property.
Many decades later, Mr Baggs has observed a return to "hands-on grieving", particularly for families that have lost babies.
"Increasingly nowadays we get more people who want to come and dress their own family members, and that happens a lot in the Indigenous community and quite a bit in some of the Europeans cultures," he said.
"The more a family involves themselves with the funeral, the better they seem to feel about things later, as they did as much as they can for the person that died."
Mr Baggs said the best death scenario for a family was still when a person had lived a full life, achieved as much as they could in their time, that they had made peace with family and friends and resolved disputes.
"The good funeral starts before you die."
