Online Funeral Services Grow in Popularity During Pandemic

Demand has risen far faster than the virus death toll, reflecting the difficulty of gathering and travel during the pandemic.

Whether that trend will abate or become another aspect of the new normal is a looming question. JL

Margot Boyer-Dry reports in the Wall Street Journal:

As the coronavirus puts in-person functions on pause, more people are turning to online businesses, delivering strong growth to this niche of the end-of-life industry. Companies that help people handle tasks surrounding death and dying online—from hosting videoconference memorials to preparing documents—have been growing in recent years, thanks in part to changing attitudes toward mortality among millennials. But the coronavirus pushed that growth into overdrive.

Last month, when Jill Frechtman lost her grandmother, she wanted to mark her passing with a memorial service—an effort complicated by a lockdown that prohibited gatherings of family and friends.

With some cajoling, she convinced her parents to try GatheringUs, an online service that hosts memorials on Zoom, starting at $1,400. Without leaving her Manhattan apartment, Ms. Frechtman put together an online service for 89-year-old Blanche Frechtman, the head of their family and a beloved community figure, in just two hours.

During the proceedings, GatheringUs handled the technical issues and logistics, like auto-muting participants during the live stream of the burial on Long Island. Following the burial, the nearly 30 attendees stayed on the video chat for hours, sharing memories of Blanche—from her tendency to make friends of strangers to her nightly phone calls with Ms. Frechtman following the nightly news.

“I thought we were going to have to bury her alone,” Ms. Frechtman recalls her mother saying, “but I felt like you were all there.”

Lives on pause

As the coronavirus puts in-person functions on pause, more people are turning to online businesses like GatheringUs, delivering strong growth to this niche of the end-of-life industry. Companies that help people handle tasks surrounding death and dying online—from hosting videoconference memorials to preparing documents—have been growing in recent years, thanks in part to changing attitudes toward mortality among millennials. But the coronavirus pushed that growth into overdrive.

Online arrangements “are being normalized quickly,” says David Sloane, professor of urban and community-health planning, policy and history at the University of Southern California and author of “Is the Cemetery Dead?”

“The pandemic creates this extraordinary circumstance,” he says. “Most of us can’t go to a funeral. We can’t go to a cemetery. We can’t go to viewing hours. [That’s] one of the reasons these startups are growing so rapidly.”

Online end-of-life businesses, by most accounts, represent a small fraction of the $21 billion industry. But experts and industry leaders report surges in user numbers since the pandemic hit. “As an industry, we are seeing our predictions come to life at hyperspeed,” says Liz Eddy, co-founder of Lantern, a service based in New York that provides free questionnaires to gather users’ end-of-life wishes, as well as checklists detailing steps to take after a family member’s death. The service also recommends companies that handle the actual arrangements, in some instances collecting a referral fee.

By mid-April, Lantern’s user numbers had ballooned by 61% from the month prior, and a similar company called Cake, based in Boston, saw its own preplanning user numbers more than quintuple in March.

Companies that handle other tasks related to the end of life are also seeing increases in growth. Brooklyn-based GatheringUs, which focuses on arranging memorials, saw traffic on its site rise 400% in the second week of April compared with the second week in March, and the company is in the midst of quintupling its team to 20 to accommodate a sharp uptick in demand.

Solace, a service that lets customers arrange cremations online, nearly doubled the number of cases it took on from February to March of this year, the company says. Prearrangements—essentially, reserving a slot for cremation in advance of death—have increased by 70% since January. The company, which serves the Portland, Ore., and Seattle metro areas, charges a flat rate of $895 for collection, cremation and delivery of remains, including fees and taxes. (None of the companies disclosed the specific number of customers using their service.)

A changing culture

For all these companies’ recent success, though, there’s a question hanging over them: Will they be able to sustain their growth after the pandemic has passed?

While Prof. Sloane of USC doesn’t think the online companies will replace big players in the traditional death industry, he predicts that they “are going to edge out more space for themselves” as consumers become familiar with their offerings.

Some traditional funeral providers, meanwhile, think offering more online services could benefit the industry.

Walker Posey, a spokesperson for the National Funeral Directors Association, says people don’t want to spend a lot of time in funeral homes, and a newfound familiarity with digital tools will lead more people to seek out online services in the future.

“The culture is changing rapidly, so the tools that we provide need to be relevant for that new culture,” says Mr. Posey, who also runs the South Carolina funeral home that has been in his family since 1879. He adds, “No one’s saying, ‘Let’s replace human interaction.’ ” Rather, he says, the technology should make the experience better for the family.

For some mourners, online services have offered advantages over traditional services.

At the suggestion of a friend, Danielle Anders from Reno, Nev., recently held a virtual memorial for her 24-year-old son, Dominic. GatheringUs helped moderate the event, setting up a welcome screen, playing a slideshow and contextualizing the family’s choice in music, explaining its significance through the chat window as it played.

Ms. Anders, who wasn’t sure what to expect from an online memorial, found the service to be a surprisingly powerful experience, and she was moved that 300 people were able to join in sharing memories of her son.

Going online made it possible to assemble Dominic’s friends and family across the country, she says. “It allowed so many more people to be a part of it than might have been if we had done it in person, even in regular times.”