The COVID-19 pandemic has left many events and celebrations cancelled or postponed in the Raccoon Valley Radio-listening area, including funeral services.

Curtis Twigg, director of Twigg Funeral Home in Panora, says he has hosted one funeral service since Governor Kim Reynolds prohibited gatherings of 10 or more people, which occurred just hours after Reynolds’ proclamation on March 17th. Since then he’s done some pre-funeral arrangements for services to be held at a later date. For a small-town funeral home, business can at times be sporadic, so Twigg says COVID-19 social distancing guidelines hasn’t changed his workflow much, “I still do the daily things that I always do, and like I said we’ve got a couple calls but I know services are going to be at a later date. So I can’t really close the funeral home all that much as far as the daily operations of one. You just gotta go with the flow I guess as far as the gathering, which is something I’ve never dealt with. I’ve been licensed for 26 years or something like that and my biggest worry is if the place is going to hold the people now you gotta limit the people and so, yeah it’s kind of an interesting time.”

Twigg says in the instance of a visitation service, he would look into expanding the set of hours in order to comply with the state’s guidelines and allow people to pay wishes to those bereaved. He also mentions that they are still providing other usual services at this time including cremation.