In mid june 2020 my father n law, Cruz Galaviz was laid to rest. My wife and siblings went to Thomas Marcom(Selma)to make arrangements. My wife came back later and said the hispanic female(later identified as Clara) that worked there was rude. I thought it was just emotions and just reassured her everything was going to be ok.
Due to COVID recommendations only 50 people were allowed in the funeral home during the viewing. An employee was at the entrance to make sure this happened. I felt it was odd they restricted the viewing location by shutting off half of the room for the viewing. It was very crowded and made no sense if they wanted social distancing. They could have left the entire room open and still restricted it to 50 people.
I'm a Veteran so I wanted to assist by reaching out to Veteran services since Cruz was an honorably discharged Veteran. I reached out to Veteran's services who were great. They set up the "Riders" who are Veterans who escort the body to the cemetery from the funeral home. The burial was to take place at 1000hrs in Selma, so the entire family got to the funeral home the next morning at 0930-0945hrs and were told by a family member the funeral home employees and "Riders" left at 0930hrs to the cemetery. The wife, children, grandchildren and everyone showed up to the funeral home to escort their husband, dad and grandfather to the cemetery and were not told about leaving at 0930. The employees from the funeral home never mentioned they were gonna leave early and made no attempt to wait or call for family, even though a family member was present at 0930 and told them the family was not aware of this.
The family then raced to the cemetery where they were expected to stay in their car which would be 25 to 100 yards away. The family got out of their cars and stood about 25-50 feet away and Clara attempted to make everyone go to their car. She then said "just stand on the sidewalk, we don't own the side walk". Wouldn't you think she would have enough compassion to say this the night before, who in their right mind is going to stay in the car when their dad is being laid to rest, were they going to find the correct car and give the flag to the wife? It just didn't make sense. You would think if she found a way for the family to be closer and it was ok to do so, she would have said something. Balloons and pigeons were being released and it appeared as if they wanted all this done from the car. One bundle of balloons were not properly tied and flew away before the burial occurred but nothing was said about it, I think Clara and an older gentlemen(employee) thought nobody seen this happen, and made no apologies.
Its my opinion when your doing something for a long time it could becomes routine and you forget why you are doing it. I think the employees have forgotten why they got into this profession(just my opinion).
It has been a month now and we called for a death certificate, but of course it was not there yet. We went to the county and got it ourselves. Multiple calls were made to Clara and we found out it wasn't even ordered. Still waiting on a call for a refund for the death certificate.
I'm only related through marriage, but I could not believe what was happening. There was no compassion given to the family, empathy was not provided with the price, it was just shocking.
The "Riders" and the veterans services were on point, I thanked one of the "Riders" for coming and he stated with full compassion "he is our brother". Hats off to the Riders. read more