Wakes in the Fast Lane: Funeral Home Offers Drive-Through Viewing

Paradise Funeral Home in Saginaw is offering drive-through visitation. Increasingly, the funeral home’s clientele are elderly, who may not be physically or emotionally able to enter a funeral home, owner Ivan E. Phillips said. (Photo: Paradise Funeral Home)

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Would you like fries with that? Or maybe you’d like to make an appointment with a personal banker?

Those aren’t questions asked at what may be Michigan’s most innovative drive-through lane, a convenience added at a funeral home in Saginaw because, let’s face it, the elderly population served by Paradise Funeral Chapel “are afraid of funeral homes,” owner Ivan E. Phillips told MLive/The Saginaw News.

Phillips said he decided to add the convenience after a woman living in a nursing home couldn’t make it to the chapel to view her husband’s body or attend his funeral.

“She would’ve got a chance to see him if we had this, so I knew we had to move forward,” Phillips said.

Phillips, who held a “viewing” to introduce the service at a Sunday open house, said he spent a great deal of time on details to ensure the departed are treated with dignity.

For example, the curtain in front of the window remains closed until a mourner pulls up. Music is played as the curtain opens, and a retractable drawer, like the kind used in drive-up banking, opens with a guest book. The drive-through option isn’t available when indoor visitation isn’t taking place, and

Though unusual, the funeral home’s drive-through visitation option isn’t unique.

A funeral home in Virginia offers a similar drive-through visitation. The convenience was added at a Los Angeles funeral home in 2011, and because the dearly departed are ensconced behind bullet-proof glass, the mortuary became a popular choice for gang funerals.

The drive-through visitation pioneer may have been Gatling’s Chapel in Chicago, which began offering closed-circuit funerals in the late 1980s, but then closed it several years later, Crain’s Chicago Business said.

The Gatling’s model was popular among young mourners, who paid their respects late at night. “You just pull up to the screen and push the button to the chapel that has their body in it,” Jeanette Williams of the funeral chapel told MLive/The Saginaw News.

But vandals targeted projector screens, so the chapel stopped offering the service.