Trying to plan a funeral with all the guidlines and restrictions is a nightmare.
Wisconsin is supposed to "open" on May 26th. My father's funeral is scheduled tentatively for the 4th of June. The church says they will be open at 1/4 capacity, blocking off every other pew and spacing people apart. Which is a max attendance of 200 people. Trouble is that my Dad knew so many people, we have large families, and it was a sudden/unexpected death, and he was kind of young which drives attendance. We could get 250 to show up without really trying.
So now we're trying to figure out if we need to make it invitation only, or open it up to everyone. And hope that the usual pattern of people coming for visitation but not the service would spread them out and not force us to turn people away.
What's also tough is that different family is different types of "Covid believers". My mother is a "Flubro" (this is just another/extra flu season and we don't shut down the country over that, etc.) My wife is a "Doomer" (full on panic, believes the MSM narrative and hand-wringing 100%) My sister is a nurse, and she's a "Doomer" too, but more out of a better-safe-than-sorry level of practicality and caution and doesn't want to feel responsible if someone attending gets sick. I'm an agnostic, where I'm half Flubro, but recognize that maybe it would have been a Doomer scenario without the shutdowns. (Can't prove a negative, and my opinion is worth bupkis in the larger context anyway...) But now as the oldest male/patriarch of the immediate family, people are kind of lobbying me to weigh in on what to do about the funeral.
My mother and sister are meeting with the parish priest on Thursday, and they love him to bits, so hopefully he'll just advise them something practical that's a decent compromise, and they'll accept that. I don't want to be in the middle.
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