Metro Detroit funeral homes overwhelmed amid coronavirus deaths

Keith Matheny
Detroit Free Press

Stephen Kemp is overwhelmed.

The president and CEO of Kemp Funeral Home & Cremation Services in Southfield is in the heart of the coronavirus pandemic's hardest-hit area of Michigan. Over the past few weeks, he has handled 49 people who died from complications related to COVID-19, with "two or three waiting for me to pick up this morning," he said Wednesday.

"It has been ... surreal," he said. "I've been doing this 36 years, and I've never seen the sheer volume and the grief that occurs with these deaths. They're so quick, they're so insidious. 

"What compounds the grief, they can't see them when they're ill. And after they die, they can't have a meaningful service — and now they can't even go to the cemetery to see their loved one buried."

Kemp called funeral directors "last responders, at the end of the healthcare chain." And the sheer volume of coronavirus' wrath in Metro Detroit has been staggering for them, as they also deal with people dying of other causes. On Wednesday, Kemp said he had 36 bodies at his funeral home awaiting burial or cremation. Funeral services, limited now as they are, are taking up to two weeks to prepare and conduct. Kemp last week rented a refrigerated trailer that holds more than 20 bodies. It's already full.

"When my wife and I drive home together every night at 10:30 p.m., we just sit on the couch and breathe," he said.

It's a similar story at the O.H. Pye III Funeral Home in Detroit. There, two employees have died from complications related to coronavirus, and other, immuno-compromised employees are in quarantine, owner and executive director Ozie Pye IV said.

"We're trying to do everything with fewer people, and have three or four times the volume that we had before," he said. "We are absolutely swamped."

Dying in Michigan comes with required-by-law paperwork, and all of it funnels through funeral home directors. They are required to file a death certificate with the local registrar within 72 hours of a death, with an attending physician or medical examiner adding medical-related information, and the funeral director including personal details obtained from the deceased's spouse or closest relative — date of birth, Social Security number, place of birth, and more.

But closed local government offices, limited hours and public employees working from home amid the pandemic, along with often overwhelmed medical staff at hospitals, has  slowed that process to a crawl, Kemp said.

If a family seeks cremation for their deceased loved one, a cremation authorization form must also be filed with and returned by the county medical examiner. Such permission is typically authorized by the surviving spouse, but coronavirus has impacted that as well, Kemp said.

"We're having instances where the next of kin has COVID, too, is in ICU on a ventilator," he said. "The kids come in, and I can't cremate (the deceased parent) because the next of kin is incapacitated."

Steve Kemp, director of Kemp Funeral Home & Cremation Services in Southfield, stands near a refrigerated truck 
used to store remains of people waiting on cremation due to paperwork processing problems with Wayne County at the funeral home in Southfield on April 16, 2020.

Pye can empathize with those hurting over their limited ability to pay tribute to their dead loved one. He's going through it now himself. His aunt and uncle, Chandra Pye-Williams and Hosea Williams, both died earlier this month in their 60s from COVID-19 related illness.

"He had it first, she was his caregiver," he said.

The family opted to have a "very limited viewing only" to comply with Michigan's executive order limiting groups to 10 people or fewer. 

One family last week even held the viewing of their deceased loved one by a video livestream, Pye said.

"They were scared," he said. "They knew their loved one had passed away from coronavirus and didn't want to be in the funeral home. Fears are still out there because of the uncertain aspects of a lot of this."

In lieu of a funeral, Detroit resident Floyd Mitchell, 80, who died from COVID-related pneumonia on April 3, is slated to be honored Saturday by family and friends driving their cars in a slow procession past his home in Hyde Park,  with his widow, Gwen Mitchell, watching.

"It's the only memorial we can offer in these desperate times for Floyd Mitchell. He deserved so much more," said family friend Rochelle Riley, a former Free Press columnist who is now the director of Arts and Culture for the City of Detroit.

Most of Michigan's coronavirus deaths are occurring in southern Oakland County, the city of Detroit and Wayne County, Kemp said.

"I feel like nobody is paying attention to us because it's not their problem," he said.

Steve Kemp (background left), director of Kemp Funeral Home & Cremation Services in Southfield and his wife Jacquie Lewis-Kemp (foreground) get information for caskets together for a family of a loved one lost to COVID-19 as they make funeral arrangements at the funeral home in Southfield on April 16, 2020.

"It's happening in the minority community in a huge way. Some of the families are indigent, some of them don't know where the insurance is. They don't know what to do or how to do it. They weren't prepared to do this because their parents were in their 40s, 50s, 60s."

Bob Hojnacki is the director of cemeteries for Catholic Funeral and Cemetery Services, a nonprofit company that works with the Archdiocese of Detroit to manage cemeteries and burials at six Catholic cemeteries in Metro Detroit: Holy Sepulchre in Southfield; Our Lady of Hope in Brownstown; Holy Cross in Detroit; St. Joseph in Monroe; Mount Hope in Pontiac and Mount Carmel in Wyandotte.

Some 39 COVID-19 victims have been buried in the cemeteries since the pandemic reached Michigan. No graveside attendees at all are allowed for a person who has died from the virus, Hojnacki said. Family may visit the graveside, following the state guidelines of 10-person groups or fewer, after the casket has been buried and burial crews have left, he said.

"It's extremely hard," he said.

The limitations extend to the priests who minister to the dying and  to grieving family members after a death, said the Rev. Adam Nowak, associate pastor at St. Frances Cabrini Parish in Allen Park.

"Everybody wants to have a funeral mass celebrated in the church for lifelong Catholics," he said. "It's very hard on the families who know their loved ones wanted this, but they can't provide it."

Nowak said a family member came to him after he presided over a graveside service earlier this week of a person who did not die from coronavirus.

"She said, 'She was the matriarch of our family. If we could have had this in the church, there would have been over 100 people there. And here we have 10,'" Nowak said.

"And for those people who pass away from COVID-19, we can literally do nothing (at the graveside)."

Instead for priests, it's phone calls to family members. Video conferences by computer.  Prayers in doorways, or from behind hospital windows.

"The greatest law of the church, the greatest commandment of the Lord, is to love one another," Nowak said. "What we're doing right now is offering an opportunity for people to love by staying away, even if that seems counterintuitive."

Kemp told the story of a woman whose husband's funeral service he is processing.

"Her husband got ill, and she said, 'You've got to go to the hospital,'" Kemp said. "They went through the drive-through checkpoint, and at the second checkpoint, they take him out of the car, to take him to the E.R. The wife says, 'Where do I park my car? I need to go sit in the Emergency Room.' But they sent her home and said they would call her."

Two days later, she got a call that her husband was dead.

"It all happened so fast," Kemp said. "She didn't get to see him. She didn't get to say goodbye. You can imagine how compounded the grief is.

"Every day, it's stories like this. You can't have a funeral,  you can't go to the cemetery you couldn't see them when they were sick. This is tragic to people. It's going to affect them for the rest of their lives."

Contact Keith Matheny: 313-222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com. Follow on Twitter @keithmatheny.