Apr 15, 2020 4 min read

Terry Churney lives 1,000 miles from his native Canonsburg and was unable to journey back to the borough from Florida last week for the funeral of his father, 88-year-old Francis Churney.

Coronavirus-related travel restrictions kept him away. But rather than miss the funeral entirely, he was able to watch it unfold live when Salandra Funeral and Cremation Services in Canonsburg presented the service live on Facebook. Both Churney and a sister who lives in Las Vegas were able to witness it.

“I was pleasantly surprised,” said Churney, who handles information technology for a transportation company in the Palm Beach, Fla., area.

The coronavirus has upended every aspect of life, and it has also upended death. Because of limits on how many people can gather in one place, attendance at wakes and services has been narrowed to a few immediate family members, an officiant and funeral home staff. Given these strictures, some families are opting to forego their loved one’s final farewell until a later date.

But some are going ahead with funerals and letting friends, family and the wider world in on the services by having them streamed online. Francis Churney’s funeral was the first time Salandra funeral home attempted it, and it has kept the recording of it on its Facebook page.

“It worked suprisingly well for our first attempt,” according to Joe Salandra, the funeral home’s owner and director. “We went back and forth, testing it and testing it.”

The prospect of live-streaming a funeral caused some jitters, Salandra admitted. Along with having to fret about funeral mainstays like music and flowers, they now had to worry about video quality and Internet connections. But the family was satisfied with how it came out.

“You still felt like you were there,” Churney said. “Everything was very nice. It was staged properly. We could see everything we needed to see. There were no technical issues, and those are things I look out for.”

Well before COVID-19 cut its path across the globe, funeral homes were already starting to deploy video and live streaming for funerals, according to Kathleen Ryan, executive director and general counsel for Pennsylvania Funeral Homes Association. Most have been providing it at no added cost.

It offers people who can’t otherwise be present “an opportunity to participate in some way,” Ryan said. “It’s good for people physically unable to attend or are geographically distant.”

The five Beinhauer funeral homes in the area have been offering to put funerals online for a while, according to Scott Beinhauer, director of funeral operations. However, few families were taking the bait.

“They just weren’t doing it,” he said, putting it down to culture or tradition. In fact, he would rarely mention its availability unless it became clear family members lived in far-flung locales.

“But now you’re trying to find ways to still include people,” he said. “And live streaming is one of our best options.”

S. Timothy Warco II, of Warco-Falvo Funeral Home in Washington, made his maiden bid to live stream a funeral a couple of weeks ago. He did briefly lose a Wi-Fi connection during the service, and “the last thing you need to be worrying about is your Wi-Fi connection.” He said for future services, the funeral home might not carry a live feed, but instead upload a video so people can watch later in the day.

“A lot of the time, people aren’t watching it live anyway,” Warco said.

There will, of course, eventually be a point where friends and families can gather for funerals and it won’t matter if there are 50 people present or 500. But it could well be that the coronavirus will help make live-streaming funerals a regular part of the way we bid farewell to those we’ve lost.

“I know this is an option we’ll make available to every single family,” Beinhauer said.