Per her wishes, Patricia Ann Wiant, 82, who passed away Monday, takes a last ride around the Canfield Village Green in a horse-drawn carriage driven by relative Sam Durr as mourners look on Saturday afternoon. Staff photo / Allie Vugrincic

Now that most funerals in the Mahoning Valley involve only a small number of people in attendance, digital conferencing, online videos and other tools for including people not physically present have become commonplace.

Smaller funerals are a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lane Family Funeral Homes and others are offering such services, but many families also have someone attending who can send it out over FaceTime or Zoom Meeting on their own, said funeral director Dave Knarr of Lane.

“We’ve had a lot of families FaceTiming services. We’ve had families Zoom Meeting services,” Knarr said of two options.

“Somewhere in the mix, there is a son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter that says ‘I’ll hook up to Aunt Jackie in Texas.’ It’s not the same by any stretch, but at least she didn’t miss it completely.”

At Higgins-Reardon Funeral Home in Canfield, young funeral director Terrance Reardon last week used his cellphone to videotape the funeral of Richard Tkach and upload it to the Higgins-Reardon website.

It was available for viewing several hours later by family members and friends who may have wanted to attend but could not. It has been the most popular type of digital offering at Higgins-Reardon and is one of the simplest.

But Reardon also used a laptop computer so that one of Tkach’s daughters, Amy Bowles from Georgia, and her children could experience the service live on FaceTime and interact with the four family members there.

Bowles, a nurse, and her family could not get a flight to Ohio in time to attend the funeral, so she worked with Reardon to allow her to be there during and after the service through technology.

The laptop, camera and software enabled Bowles, her daughter in Connecticut, her son in southwestern Ohio, and Bowles’ sister’s fiance in Delaware to be seen on the laptop screen as they watched the service.

‘I LOVED IT’

“I loved it because our own daughter could not come in from Georgia … so she felt much better about being there with us, and it was wonderful,” said Frances Tkach, Richard’s wife.

“Especially his baby daughter,” Frances said of their daughter Amy. “And the grandchildren. There were viewers from Connecticut, Georgia, Delaware and southwestern Ohio, just watching — family that would have been there if they could have, children and grandchildren,” she said.

“It’s helped her cope with not being able to be there with her daddy,” Frances said of the FaceTime livestream. “She was Daddy’s little girl; so imagine that, not being able to be there.”

“She was heartbroken she couldn’t attend services for her own father,” Amy’s sister, MaryBeth Tkach, said.

When the funeral was over, Amy and the others also got to talk to Frances, MaryBeth, son Rick Tkach and his fiancee — the four people who physically attended the service.

“I thought it was the saddest thing in the world,” Frances said of having to hold Richard’s funeral without all of the people who cared about him being there.

“This man who touched everybody’s lives,” she said of her husband, who was known as “The King” at Shepherd of the Valley nursing home in Boardman because he loved making people laugh.

Frances did the one thing she could do to make people know what kind of man Richard, 88, was to his family and country: She wrote him a fitting obituary.

“He touched their hearts, and yet we couldn’t have the proper respects, so I thought, ‘By golly, I’m going to let them know what kind of a man he was,’ and I just wrote from my heart, and it filled one whole column from the top to the bottom,” she said.

The family plans to have a memorial Mass later, but it could be a year before that’s possible. “I didn’t want him forgotten,” she said.

‘FUNERALVUE’

Tom James, owner of James Funeral Home in Newton Falls, has been providing livestreaming of funeral services for several years and now offers a type called FuneralVue that avoids any legal issues that can arise when someone tries to show a funeral over Facebook or YouTube.

Funeral homes pay licensing fees related to broadcasting copyrighted music used at funeral services, but Facebook and YouTube use algorithms to identify and block copyrighted music, according to the National Funeral Director’s Association.

Though not every family is prepared to livestream a funeral service, the public has “really embraced” the social-distancing aspects of making funeral arrangements, Lane’s Knarr said.

“Ninety percent of our arrangments we do over the phone now and via email,” he said. “We can email everything we need to. Our directors can send families casket catalogs. And anything we need signed, we can email everything.”

For people who don’t have the ability to use email for documents, they can still meet with funeral-home personnel in person, Knarr said.

Sam Tetrault, a writer for the web site joincake.com gave tips in a recent article (www.joincake.com/blog/zoom-funeral/) for how to plan a funeral using Zoom videoconferencing, how to invite others to watch the video and how to watch it.

Using Zoom typically requires some planning for those not familiar with it, such as downloading software or getting familiar with how it works ahead of time.

erunyan@tribtoday.com