Funeral director 'can't even fathom' how many services held during the Spanish flu

The last year has been difficult for the funeral industry — not because they've seen a spike in business, but because public health orders have restricted how people can celebrate the lives of those who have died.

"It's not necessarily the ceremony or a minister or a priest standing in front of a microphone pronouncing words that make a … funeral important, it's what happens after," said Kevin Sweryd, director of Bardal Funeral Home. "It's during the coffee service, when everybody's laughing."

Last month, the province made changes to pandemic restrictions, which included the maximum capacity for funerals to increase from 10 people to 25. Even with that change, Sweryd says he can't accommodate coffee service. 

This year has been a time of reflection for Sweryd, whose funeral home has been around since 1894, and is the oldest privately-owned funeral home in Winnipeg. The business has been through several difficult seasons of influenza, but to date, the worst remains the 1918 Spanish flu. 

Sweryd has the records to prove it — a collection of very old ledger books that lay out a timeline of all the funerals held at the business on Sherbrook street.  

"We still have all our records going back to 1894. Now, the records are not great, but they do …  paint a picture and they do tell a story." said Sweryd. 

The story it told of the Bardal funeral home, Sweryd said, is "it looked a lot busier than it normally was." 

Sweryd dug up ledgers from the early 1900s, and says that typically one book would cover two years of funerals. The ledger which captured the year the Spanish flu arrived in Winnipeg only covered eight months — from August 1918 to March 1919. 

During the Spanish flu, Bardal Funeral Home went from holding five funerals a week, on average, to 45 funerals a week. 

"I know what it's like to do seven funerals in a week … [but] to try and accommodate 45 in a week, and then have to do that for half a year, must have been intense and exhausting. I can't even fathom it," said Sweryd. 

"I think it just would have been a lot of long days, a lot of hard work and a lot of heartbroken families." 

Looking through the ledger for the year of the Spanish flu, Sweryd says that at first, many deaths were noted as caused by illnesses that impact the lungs, like tuberculosis, bronchitis and pneumonia.

"Then all of a sudden you start seeing page after page … [of] exclusively influenza deaths, and then by 1919, they stopped calling it influenza and started calling it Spanish influenza," said Sweryd. 

Spanish flu was 'off the charts' 

When asked what comparisons he can draw from the number of funerals held during the Spanish flu and today's pandemic, Sweryd said his funeral home hasn't seen a change in how many funerals they hold. 

"I'm not trying to discount the real danger … the current pandemic presents, because there's a lot of data that shows that for people that are vulnerable, this is very dangerous," said Sweryd. 

"But we're still doing the average number of funerals that we typically have done, and if I compare this year to the last five years, I don't see a huge difference … so what was happening in the Spanish flu was off the charts compared to what's happening now." 

Sweryd attributes this difference to improved global communication of the virus and advances in medicine, noting that the Spanish flu occurred before the invention of ventilators and antiviral drugs. 

While official numbers on excess mortality caused by COVID-19 in 2020 haven't been finalized, estimates released by Statistics Canada do appear to line up with Sweryd's observations. 

There were weeks throughout the year where the number of deaths in Manitoba exceeded estimates, but it wasn't until November that there was a noticeable trend of excess mortality, according to Statistics Canada. 

Higher estimated rates of excess mortality were noted in Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.

Still, the pandemic has affected the type of work Sweryd is able to do.

"I haven't had a coffee service in a year … I haven't heard the laughter, and that is one of the things that really struck me in the last year," he said.

"One of my highest badges of honour as a funeral director is when a family leaves and says, 'I really thought this was going to be so hard, but you've made it easy, I didn't expect to laugh so much making arrangements for my mother or my father.'"