Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Strate Funeral Home Director Dan Verhuel (left) and manager Mike Strite (right) have traveled to some of the most heavily populated parts of the country to assist funeral homes during the pandemic.
DAVENPORT – The number of COVID-19 cases is down to three in Lincoln County as of press time, but the death counts suffered in big cities like New York and Los Angeles has left many funeral homes overrun in the past year. Many needed assistance from small town funeral homes around the county.
That's when Manager Mike Strite and Director Dan Verhuel of Strate Funeral Home stepped in.
The two have traveled to New York, Miami and taken one trip to Orange County, California each in the past year to assist funeral homes with various tasks during the COVID-19 nationwide outbreak.
52,789 virus-caused deaths have been recorded in Orange County, while 47,345 have been tallied in New York. 31,384 COVID deaths have been marked in Miami.
Strite was first to answer the call made by Dignity Memorial, which owns Strate Funeral Home. In April he went to New York city to assist a care center in removing bodies of COVID-19 victims from hospitals.
"A lot of people don't understand the amount of death that was occurring in these areas," Strite said. "We don't see that out here; we're rural...you don't really grasp it unless you see it firsthand."
A few months later, Verhuel went to Miami to help oversee the restructuring of a care center to make it more COVID-friendly and include better safety measures for funerals.
"(It entailed) everything from the intake of human remains to seeing them out the door as we got them (in) a casket," Verhuel said.
This year, Verhuel went to Long Beach, California at the end of January into Feburary. When he returned, Strite went to the Orange County Care Center near Los Angeles. By this point, both men had received their vaccinations against COVID-19, so didn't need to quarantine upon arrival or return.
Strite had to quarantine two weeks last year when he returned from New York.
Both Orange County missions were to assist care centers with embalming deceased virus victims.
"There it was more specific tasks," Verhuel said. "We were both doing embalmings in the locations we were at."
Strite said he wanted to help the deceased "look as good as they can" to help bring closure to suffering families who have lost loved ones to the virus in his travels to Orange County.
"That helps with the final viewing, closure and moving forward in the grief process," Strite said. "That's the same mindset I took to L.A., knowing what my task was there. Dan, I think, has the same similar mindset. Whether you know them or not, you want the person to look the best they can, and that's what our goal is."
Both Strite and Verhuel touted the assistance of James Huevel, who runs the Grand Coulee location and assisted when one member was out in the big cities helping funeral home efforts. Strite and Verhuel were never gone at the same time, however.
"If it wasn't for having a great staff to step up when Dan and I were gone, this wouldn't have been possible," Strite said.
Strite noted that Verhuel's role in California changed from what he originally thought it would be, but in the small town of Davenport, they are used to performing every funeral-related task, which made their services useful.
"We were basically external employees of the group there," Strite said. "We do all the roles, so we can step in at any point and help with what needed to be done."
One hospital Strite attended several times in New York was Elmhurst Hospital, which was hit by virus victims especially hard.
"It just seemed like they were continuing to get hit hard. Unless you've seen it first hand, you wouldn't ever grasp the amount of death," Strite said. "A lot of people think it's just political, but it's out there."
Verhuel said that as a funeral director, it can be easy to be desensitized to mass amounts of death, until you witness it first hand.
"We have a very sterile view of this whole thing," Verhuel said. "You go somewhere like that, you realize your sterile view is not reality. COVID is real, and what's happening is real. Whether we agree or disagree with how the politicians are handling it doesn't matter; it's still there."
"And we've had more cases than people would care to admit to in our area, and we've handled it quite a little bit here," he added. "We just don't have the media presence that you would in a bigger city, where they're counting every single case and all the things that they do."
Strite noted that small town residents often wonder why they must take precautions against the virus when living in a much more rural area compared to New York, where people are crammed together by the square mile and apartments are literally stacked on top of each other.
"There's a lot of truth to that. When you get in a more confined area...I learned that people live right on top of people (in New York)," Strite said. "You get it in one enclosed building like that, there's not a lot of open air-space, whether it's the flu or this or that."
Ultimately, Strite said he and Verhuel travelled to assist wherever the needs lay. Originally, they planned to keep their travels quiet, but after their trip to California, decided to come to The Times with their story.
"We thought (in a small town), it might be interesting to know that your local funeral has branched out," he said. "It's made us re-evaluate how we have to think outside the box to help these families because of the restrictions, but give their loved ones the honor and respect they deserve."
Drew Lawson is the editor of the Davenport Times. He is a graduate of Eastern Washington University.
Reader Comments(0)