Being director of a funeral home in Zachary, Louisiana, means that sometimes your neighbor calls when he sees cars in the parking lot to ask, “Who died?”
Zachary, a suburb of Baton Rouge, has a population of around 18,000.
George Joseph “GJ” Charlet III and his three brothers own one of the two funeral homes in Zachary. During the coronavirus pandemic, they found that their business – like many other small town funeral homes in the United States – witnessed the unfolding of the disaster up close and in person.
The company has been in the Charlet family since his grandfather and brother opened it in the 1940s. Charlet is one of three funeral directors at the Charlet family funeral home. He grew up 32 kilometers north of Zachary, behind another funeral home his family owns in Clinton, Louisiana, which was damaged in the historic floods of August 2016.
Having been raised in a funeral home, Charlet knows how to prepare for the worst. He was taught from a very young age to fill the hearse’s gas tank before the local school prom, in case there were deaths from traffic accidents.
But even Charlet was not prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic. “In the first few months, it was really scary because there was not much guidance on what we should be doing,” he said. The lack of body bags meant that some bodies had to be wrapped in sheets.
There were 552 deaths from Covid in the parish of East Baton Rouge, where Zachary is located, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Health. The parish had an average positivity rate of 10% in the last six weeks. In the same period, an average of 13% of those tested for Covid-19 in the two census sectors that make up Zachary were positive for him.
There were more deaths in the community because of Covid, but that did not burden the funeral home, Charlet said. Typically, they perform about five services a week. But since Thanksgiving, Covid’s death toll has increased, he said. The funeral home performs services for some of the deaths at the Louisiana state penitentiary in Angola. There were 16 deaths of Covid-19 prisoners in prison.
Charlet printed an essay entitled Always Go to the Funeral, by Deirdre Sullivan, in a scrapbook he wants to read at his funeral. “Humans need that farewell ritual,” he said. “You have to acknowledge someone’s death.”
But his 80-year-old uncle recently caught Covid and is very ill. If he dies, Charlet doesn’t want his mother to go to the funeral. “I just wanted people to be more cautious and take the opportunity to write a letter of condolence,” he said. “It is a strange place for me to be. It is counter-intuitive for my livelihood. “