Diary of Spain in Lockdown - Shut out from his own father's funeral

Wednesday 8^th April – Valencian son barred from his own father’s funeral. What kind of a world are we living in?

I read a heart-breaking story today of a Valencian lawyer unable to attend his own father’s burial because of strict new rules brought in to stop large crowds at funerals.

Aware of the need for social distancing, no siblings, nephews, nieces or even sons or daughters-in-law of the deceased, had come to the cemetery, just the dead man’s wife and their three children. But the new order that has been passed clearly states a maximum of three people. Plus a priest or ‘similar person’. The family tried everything they could to be admitted, but the cemetery staff were adamant, maximum three.

The irony is, the father hadn’t even died of coronavirus, he’d been ill with cancer and just had the misfortune to pass away during this pandemic.

The lawyer, Raúl Gil, suggested he act as the ‘similar person’, Spain being a nondenominational country, but the cemetery staff weren’t having that either, nor would they allow the siblings to interchange halfway through the ceremony. The order had come from the Ministry of Health and they were following it, clearly tired of complaints and disagreements from grieving families at the cemetery gates.

Mr Gil has written an open letter to the Mayor of Valencia, asking for this matter to be looked into urgently so no other family has to suffer the way his did.

We can criticise the staff, and yes, perhaps they could have turned a blind eye, let one extra person in. What difference would it make? But what about the next burial, when the deceased had four or five children? Or in the case of my husband’s family, six? The generation that had families in the sixties and seventies in Spain, and are the individuals being hardest hit by coronavirus, rarely had less than three offspring. The generation burying their parents are Spain’s baby boomers and there are a lot of them.

Now that Mr Gil’s story has been made public, let’s hope the government rethinks its policy on who can and can’t attend funerals. And rather than using hard and fast numbers, use a bit of good old common sense.

Meanwhile Boris Johnson remains in intensive care but we are told he is improving and deaths in the UK have shot up to 938, just 12 shy of Spain’s worst day. Here there has been a slight increase on yesterday , up by 14 to 757, but the curve certainly seems to be flattening here.