UAE-based Indian witnessed father’s funeral on FB Live

Dubai, April 9 (IANS) An Indian woman based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) had to see her father’s funeral on Facebook Live due to the coronavirus pandemic, a media report said.

At the risk of not gaining closure personally, Susan Thomas, a resident of Sharjah, chose not to attend the funeral even though she had managed to fly to Kochi from Dubai and had reached on March 20, a day before her father died, said the Gulf news report on Wednesday.

Due to the coronavirus spread, Thomas was in a self-imposed isolation for 14 days along with her daughter and entrepreneur husband in her in-law’s home.

To make matters further complicated, there was an infected passenger on their flight, putting them in a high-risk category.

“I saw my father’s funeral on Facebook Live. But it was a choice that I made on my own because I could have been a carrier of coronavirus since I had travelled from Dubai to Kochi the day before he died and there are many old aunts and uncles who would have been at the funeral. I had to be responsible,” Thomas told Gulf News on the phone from Kochi.

Thomas, who works as a school administrative staff in Sharjah, describes the current reality of living in the times of coronavirus pandemic as “dystopian”.

“Never in a million years did I think that I would reach a point in my life where I was in the same city as my father, but would have to watch his funeral on a streaming platform.

“Such bizarre things happened only in films and series set in some dystopian world. But that’s our new reality,” said Thomas.

–IANS

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