COVID-19 has taken the lives of more than 5,000 North Carolinians, and the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services estimates the disease has increased the state's death rate by 5%.
LaKeisha Butts, an end-of-life doula, talks with Tested producer Rebecca Martinez about the challenges of comforting and offering spiritual guidance for a person over the phone instead of at their bedside. Butts shares how, as an African American woman who has lost some of her own loved ones to COVID, it's much harder to grieve them without community celebrations of life.
And host Dave DeWitt speaks with Heather Hill, a funeral director at Renaissance Funeral Home and Crematory in Raleigh, about how funerals have changed since this spring.
