The banal horror of Zoom Funerals

Of the three grandparents that have passed away, I have only attended one of their funerals. In-person, at least.

My maternal grandfather passed away in 2021 at the height of the COVID pandemic. In a culture where funerals must happen immediately, a two-week quarantine period stopped any chance of us going. Instead, we sat in our kitchen, dressed in black, saying farewell to our granddad through the spotlighted speaker window of Zoom.

Four years later, my grandmother passed away. No pandemic, no quarantine, no problem. By all rights we should have been able to go.

What we had forgotten is that my grandmother always had a flair for the dramatic. She hadn't died at just any time of year, she had died during the auspicious Korean harvest festival, Chuseok. One of the most important national holidays of the year, many Koreans like to travel during this time as they get several days off in a row. They like to fly to places like Malaysia, France and the UK, and then they all come back at the end of the holiday period. All in one go. On the same weekend. The weekend my grandmother died.

So there I was again, sat in our kitchen, dressed in black. This time, it was just me and my dad. My sister was in Malaysia and managed to catch a flight from there, and through some miracle, my mum managed to get the final seat on the one flight that wasn't fully booked.

There is something horrifying about experiencing the death of a loved one online. A fixed position camera restricts our view of the room, locking us further into a position we did not want to nor ask to be in. A green box highlights the screen to signify that the pastor's voice is about to come through the speakers, tinny and distorted. We can just about make out the shape of our family in the crowd, but the poor internet connection makes it difficult to tell who's who.

It's just me and my dad, sat at the dinner table, crying our eyes out. Alone. In that moment we mourn not just grandma, but also the distance between us and our family. We are separated by two screens and 8,880 kilometres. I cannot hold my mother in my arms. I cannot exchange stories of my grandma with my aunts. I cannot share a meal with my sister or my cousins.

I cannot even say farewell to my grandmother. I receive pictures of her through the Korean messaging app Kakao Talk. She looks peaceful, like she had just fallen asleep. She had always been a fashionable woman and had picked out simple, elegant funerary clothes. Pure white, as is Korean tradition. As beautiful in death as she was in life. But there is no final goodbye.

The next day I wake up early to watch her leave the funeral home. The sun has not yet risen in London. Her funerary photo comes out first, and then the coffin follows. I hear my family's quiet sniffling turn into sobbing as her coffin is loaded into the hearse. The image on the screen goes blurry as tears fill my eyes and my sister's hands shake with grief. I watch as the hearse drives off. We exchange a few words with people briefly, which I do not remember. Then we hang up, and that is it.

The Zoom Funeral is perhaps the worst of both worlds. It provides you with a front-row seat of grief, whilst being a painful reminder of the fact that you are not there to mourn the loss with your loved ones. Instead of a proper farewell, you are afforded only a weak copy, a watered-down version of closure. Worst of all, you are unable to engage in the simple act of a warm hug.

There is no warmth, there is no comfort. There is only the cold glow of the laptop screen.