MIAMI—More than three miles off the coast of Key Biscayne, a small island village neighboring Miami, a 33-foot catamaran bobs in the Atlantic. It’s Tuesday afternoon, and while his crew of scuba divers do maintenance on a group of buoys, Capt. Jim Hutslar plans to scatter the ashes of a few recently deceased individuals in the water over the Neptune Memorial Reef, a large, artificial, rocky structure that resembles the lost city of Atlantis.
Beneath the glassy surface, 76 columns and a collection of marine life carved in stone cover several acres of ocean land at an intensity of 40 feet. The sculptures are made of a concrete addition and the cremated remains of other deceased people who chose Neptune as their final resting place, Hutslar told the Daily Beast.
Lately, these other people have inevitably included a wave of coronavirus patients in one of the worst hot spots in the U.S. pandemic.
“He’s been very busy,” said Hutslar, who helped build Neptune and works for the funeral company that owns it. “For the past six months, every month, more and more people have chosen to hold funerals at sea. I don’t have an accurate account, but we’re seeing record numbers.”
Although Hutslar stated that he did not know how many of those buried in the synthetic reef were similar to COVID-19, he thought it as a majority. “Recently, we’ve added a few hundred deaths a day, the maximum of which happen in South Florida,” he said of the state’s coVID-19 total. “Since Miami hit hard, our parent company has sent other people to help us with the workload.”
And with Florida coming off its deadliest week of the pandemic, local burial and funeral workers like Hutslar are hoping to serve as an alternative to overflowing morgues and temporary corpse containers that have become a fixture in hot spots across the country. On July 31, Florida’s Department of Health reported 257 deaths, breaking the state’s fatality record for a fourth straight day. After two consecutive days of dipping back under 100 daily deaths, the Sunshine State reported 245 deaths on Tuesday.
The old guard of the classic burial houses in Magic City felt it.
Patrick Range II, manager and general counsel for Miami-based Range Funeral Home, said last week he was nearing his capacity. “What we try to avoid is having families wait for long periods of time before having services and final dispositions of their loved ones,” Range said. “We try to encourage them to make a final decision so that we don’t have a backlog. Those limits are being tested.”
Donald Van Ordsel, president of Van Ordsel Funeral and Cremation Services, a funeral home chain based in Miami-Dade County’s unincorporated Kendall neighborhood, said the local system for processing death was in shambles. “Because there are so many COVID cases, it’s taking longer for doctors and the medical examiner to approve death certificates,” Van Ordsel said last month.
As funeral homes see their limits being tested, and as a never-ending season of pandemic death casts a shadow over the country, burials at sea are experiencing their own surge in demand. Dawn Mergelsberg, the Miami boat captain who owns a company called New Choice Burials, has been scattering ashes at sea for more than 13 years. In the past month, she’s done approximately 20 scatterings, she told The Daily Beast. “At least half of them were COVID deaths,” she said.
It’s a lonely goodbye for folks who use Mergelsberg’s services: She usually allows up to six relatives to accompany her to the scattering site, but because of the pandemic, no outsiders are currently permitted on her boat. “It’s to keep them, myself, and my first mate safe,” she said. “We will take photos and give them a certificate with the nautical coordinates of their loved one’s final journey. For some folks, they want to get closure as soon as possible.”
Brad White, a captain who runs New England Sea Funerals, who is saying that his company was receiving an avalanche of requests for ceremonies in autumn and winter, hoping that they would have a pandemic effect would have declined until then.
“We’re seeing more begging proficiency programs from Panama City to Destiny and the starboard side of the Florida coast from Palm Beach to Cape Canaveral,” White told the Daily Beast. “We have about a dozen requests to bury the total plot at sea, yet we are delaying all those who have died of COVID until we hear from other funeral associations that it is. Meanwhile, New England Burials at Sea is Holding ceremonies, like other actors at the water funeral scene, focusing on scattering the ashes of COVID-19 victims, he said.
Unlike Mergelsberg, White stated that lately it allows up to 10 to 15 passengers on giant boats that allow a smart social distance. “It’s the length of any organization that attends a funeral at sea,” White said. “Many don’t need to jeopardize their circle of relatives, so they postpone what is a perfectly portable event.”
Hutslar, the boat captain and dive instructor who manages Neptune Memorial Reef, said his employer, Service Corporation International, the largest funeral home company in America, limits sea burials to eight people. “We’ve had 20 to 30 families postpone because of the restrictions,” Hutslar said. “But we are still busy.”
The pandemic hit Hutslar near his home. His workplace manager placed a coronavirus and had to be quarantined for two weeks, he said. And a friend, a local funeral director in his 40s, recently shot dead from the disease, he said.
“She just died after spending 10 weeks in ICU care,” Hutslar told The Daily Beast. “Even a ventilator didn’t help her.”
While the main points of his most recent arrangements were still in spite of all defined, Neptune will be his last resting place, Hutslar said.
“That was her wish: to be part of the reef.”
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