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funerals

A woman holding a rose at a funeral.

A family in Rochester, New York, is seething after going on an intense, four-year emotional rollercoaster, much of which could have been prevented. In July 2021, the family of Shanice Crews reported her missing after she abruptly disappeared, leaving two children behind. In April of 2024, police informed the family that she had passed away and her body was found in a Rochester lot.

To add further grief to their incredible loss, the family was told that she died from acute cocaine intoxication, even though they believed that Crews was never involved with the drug. “Reading the autopsy was traumatic. That was, it's one thing to hear it, you know what I’m saying, but then it’s another thing to actually read it, and then her name is attached to it,” Crews’ sister, Shanita Hopkins, told Rochester First. “So we thinking, this is how she died. And then we’re trying to think, did somebody like lace her, or is she doing this on her? It’s so much that goes into it. Your mind just goes crazy.”

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Because the body was in a state of advanced decomposition, authorities didn’t allow the family to see it. Still, they insisted that the dental records on the corpse matched. The family quickly had the body cremated and then, last summer, held a memorial service for Crews.

Then, last November, Hopkins received a shocking text from a person she did not know in Detroit. The text was accompanied by a photo of Crews looking happy and healthy. “Her first message is ‘Ma’am’ — with the picture of my sister – ‘Ma’am, I’m concerned, your sister is not dead. She just volunteered at my event today. This is just a random message,” Hopkins added.


The Monroe County Medical Examiner’s Office, which swore that the dental records were a match, conducted a DNA test on the unknown woman’s ashes. “We went the next day. They wanted my youngest sister because she and Shanice have the same mom and dad, and then they wanted her son. So both of them went and they did a DNA test, and when the results came back, they said it wasn’t it wasn’t a match,” Shanita says. “We dealt with the ashes and stuff–we put them in necklaces and we mixed my mom with this stranger…yes,” Shanita says.

The medical examiner’s office has offered to pay the family back for the cremation and funeral expenses, but the family wants more than that. They’ve recently hired a lawyer to examine the family’s options.

death certificate, pronounced death, certificates, legal documents, death, united statesA death certificate.via Canva/Photos

It will be interesting to see what difficulties Crews may experience after she has been declared deceased. In 2023, Phil Anderson was declared dead by the IRS and didn’t realize it until he tried to file his taxes, and his account was locked. His social security number was mixed up with his daughter’s, who had passed away from cystic fibrosis. Anderson had to reach out to his Congresswoman, Brittany Peterson, who represents Colorado’s 7th district, to have his IRS account unlocked. "Last time I checked, and in the immortal words of Monty Python, 'I'm not dead yet,'" he said, according to USA Today. Although it’s relatively rare for the US government to declare someone deceased incorrectly, it does happen. According to USA Today, 3.1 million deaths are reported to the Social Security Administration every year, and less than one-third of one percent ever need to be corrected.

Canva

Earlier this month, I attended my first Zoom wedding. A week after that, I attended a Zoom baby shower.

Tomorrow, I'll attend a Zoom gathering to mourn the loss of a family friend. His name was Peter. He died of COVID-19 last week.

This gathering isn't technically a funeral or memorial service, but rather a virtual devotional taking place on Zoom at the same time as Peter's physical burial. A few close friends and family will gather at the gravesite—masked and distanced—while the rest of us share readings and prayers over Zoom to honor his interment.

It's weird. There's no other way to say it. With the wedding and baby shower, we all sort of laughed our way through the weirdness. We acknowledged the bummer of not being able to get together, but at this point we're all accustomed to having to meet virtually. Zoom celebrations are better than no celebrations at all.

But mourning this way feels...different. We can't laugh away the awkwardness of it when the Zoom meeting itself is a reminder of the tragic cause of our friend's death.


Celebratory gatherings are fun, but not necessary. Gathering when someone dies feels necessary in a way, and the inability to do that adds an extra layer of loss to the grief we're already experiencing. Normally, our whole community would gather together to honor Peter's life tomorrow. We'd put on appropriate funeral attire, stand side by side at his grave, hold hands or hug one another as we mark the momentousness of his passing. We'd all bring food and break bread together as we share stories of his life. We'd pass around tissues, crying and laughing and sharing in the oh-so-human experience of bringing together the lives he had touched.

But we can't do any of that. If we did, we'd run the risk of having to do it all over again for another friend or loved one taken too soon by this stupid virus. So we do what we can do and deal with the strange questions—What does one wear to a Zoom mourning? How long it will be before we can actually gather for a real memorial service? Will it feel like it's too late then? Will we want to do that in the midst of celebrating a return to non-distanced life?

This pandemic has taken so much, and each thing stings in its own way. The death toll itself is overwhelming, especially here in the U.S. where we have already lost more than 330,000 lives. A hundred 9/11s and counting. Five Vietnams in less than a year. It's unreal. In the beginning, we were told that all of us would likely end up knowing someone who died of COVID-19, and some people have now lost multiple family members. More will follow as we head into the deadliest month of the pandemic. That's not doom and gloom forecasting—that's the reality of the current moment.

But the loss of in-person mourning as millions are losing loved ones before they expected to is a tragedy in and of itself. There's a cruel irony in it, that we can't gather in person to mourn if we want to stop the thing that's making it so we can't gather in person to mourn. When we need the comfort of coming together the most, we can't, as indulging in that comfort could lead to even more suffering. Of all of the sacrifices we've had to make, the loss of communal mourning is one of the hardest.

And so we open our computers and enter our virtual meeting rooms and try to comfort one another through our grief amid the inevitable unmute reminders. It's weird. It all feels wrong. But it's necessary. We need to mourn our losses together. We also need to be able to mourn the fact that we're not able to do that the way we want to.

There is gratitude to be found in all of this, of course. It's pretty incredible that we live in a time when we have the technology to at least see one another's faces and hear people's voices as we share our losses at a distance. If this pandemic had hit in my childhood, we'd have had no community ability to mourn at all. A Zoom gathering to mourn is better than no gathering at all—but it's still all of the weird, wrong, sad things at once.

And what's extra painful about it is that it didn't have to be this way. Next time we have a pandemic, let's all agree to just follow New Zealand's lead, shall we? Hundreds of thousands of Zoom funerals really ought to be enough to get us all on the same page.