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Sudbury funeral homes are busy as people honour loved ones lost during the pandemic

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With the COVID-19 pandemic and health restrictions making a difficult time even harder for more than a year, funeral service providers in Sudbury say they are now busier than ever trying to honour lives lost over the last several months.

"On Saturday, we had eight different gatherings… which in Sudbury, is a large number of people to have funerals or memorial services," said Gerry Lougheed Jr., of Lougheed Funeral Homes. "This morning, I’ve already arranged three different memorial gatherings for people who died during COVID-19."

With Ontario now in Phase 3 of reopening, the capacity limit is dependent on the size of the funeral home. However, other health measures are still in place.

"We still wear the face masks. If you’re in a bubble, good for you, if you’re not in a bubble, you’re going to have the six-foot social distancing. You still have to sign a guest book with a telephone number in case there’s COVID-19 tracing," Lougheed Jr. said.

Even though things aren’t completely back to normal yet, officials said that families need these services to help get closure.

"I’ll give you an example from one of the funerals or gatherings on Saturday," Lougheed Jr. said. "He and I have been friends for 40 years. He loved his wife very, very much. She had a very, very difficult cancer journey and he was with her every moment of the way and he felt that he didn’t get that end experience with regards to his relatives, his friends, people from out of town. And on Saturday, he gave me a big hug and said 'she would have really liked this and I really like this.'"

With restrictions being eased and guest capacity no longer limited when it comes to funerals, there is also talk of a community celebration. It’s an idea that came from city councillor Michael Vagnini last year.

"We want to allow people from across the city to be able to come out and then, you know, their picture of each family member will be up on the screen and we may say a few words about them," Vagnini said. "Just sharing and breaking some bread and understanding that their loss was the loss of the community."

Officials said that whether or not this gathering moves forward will depend on the need in the community.

"The next step is to see when the rules and guidelines ease up that we can do something of this nature," Vagnini said. "Then we will be going back out into the community, talk to the people, allow them to come back to us and say 'yeah, this is something great, we want to sign up for it.' Or as you said, a lot of people are doing their celebrations of life with just their family members because it is opening up and people don’t want to wait a year or two to actually do something."

However, he said, the idea is to give everyone a chance to say goodbye properly.

"I do a thing on Christmas Day called No One Eats Alone, and we have people from the community that really have a very, very small family unit and in a time like this they also have that same small family unit and we want to be able to bring them together as well to realize, as I said earlier, that they aren’t suffering alone," he said.

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