AARP Hearing Center
Sterling “Ruffin” Maddox Jr., 78, was a mover and shaker in greater Washington, D.C. A civil engineer, he was a Maryland state legislator and worked as a real estate developer and agent.
He was a quintessential people person, the type whose funeral normally would have drawn a huge crowd — but these are not normal times.
After Maddox's death from COVID-19, on March 24, in a Virginia assisted living facility, his daughters and grandsons were allowed to spend two hours with him in a Maryland funeral home before he was cremated. A minister attended, courtesy of the app FaceTime. His daughters put a cellphone on a pillow near his ear in the casket so his two brothers in Florida could say goodbye.
His daughter, Jennifer Maddox Sergent, 50, says she didn't expect her father's death would be different from that of her mother, who passed away in 2017. She and her sister, Katharine, were at their mom's side and held her hands.
"It was a textbook beautiful death,” Sergent says. “This was not the script that we got to go by this time around.”
Before contracting the coronavirus, Maddox had Parkinson's disease and dementia. That his residence closed to visitors in March meant his daughters could not be with him during his last 12 days.
"Our experience has been repeated tens of thousands of times all over the globe,” says Sergent. “You can't see your loved ones for days and weeks, and all of a sudden, they're gone, and you're never able to properly say goodbye."
Funeral rituals transform
"Proper” goodbyes are a ritual of the past — for now. As Americans mourn their dead, families like Maddox's, with the help of funeral directors and clergy, are rewriting the norms of farewells because of stay-at-home orders, social distancing and travel restrictions.
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