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Mostly Cloudy Last remaining funeral home marks 75th anniversary
Over the past 75 years, the Edward F. Lieber Funeral Home has tended to the deceased with care and comforted families who have grieved their losses. The business was founded in 1947 by Edward Lieber, a returning World War II veteran who had served as a medic.
As the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded, death has been an unrelenting, outsized presence, and the home’s funeral service director and owner, James Lieber, 63, and his son, Kyle 32, Edward’s son and grandson, deal with death up close, day to day. Paul Lieber, 69, is James’s partner, his brother and Kyle’s uncle. The profession isn’t for everyone, James acknowledges, but they are there not simply as caretakers of the deceased, but to provide a space of compassion and comfort for the living.
“We don’t want to just sit and be business-like across from the family,” James said. “We try to be personal.”
The Liebers strive to personalize every funeral service, helping families grieve together, fondly remember, process, and reckon with loss fully and intimately.
“Each funeral is different,” James said. “Each person is different. And we try and tailor it to what they like. We always tell the family to bring things in that they’d like to put around the chapel. If the person liked sports or painting or whatever their hobbies were, we put [mementos] around to make it more like their home. It’s supposed to be a celebration of a person’s life. You make it an easier situation for people to grief.”
Kyle said he believes that when it comes to helping families through the grieving process, the little things count the most. “We’ve had a full motorcycle in the room with the deceased,” Kyle said. “He was a big motorcyclist. He wanted his Harley there, and the family wanted his motorcycle in the room that was being reposed for viewing. We’ve also buried people with pool sticks — all kinds of things. What people want to do is important to them and important to us.”
“When we go to a wake, it’s always awkward for anybody, even me,” James said. “… Really, the best thing you can do is just be present for the people. You being there says everything. There is no making it better. You’re just here helping them through the journey.”
James’s desire to be present for every family that comes to the funeral home has not gone unchallenged. At the height of the pandemic, as deaths increased, the facility saw a surge of calls from people scrambling for a place to bury their dead. “It was heart-wrenching,” James recounted. “Our phone would keep ringing all day long. Most of the calls came from people further out on the Island as well as Queens, Brooklyn and even the Bronx, calling to find some funeral home that would pick up their loved one and take care of the funeral.”
“We were at mercy of the crematories and cemeteries who were all backed up,” Kyle said. “It was just overwhelming.”
The Liebers could have seized on the overwhelming demand and turned a quick profit by taking in more clients, but only by compromising their quality of service and level of care. “We could have done in a couple of weeks the amount of business we could have done in one year,” James said. But their values were at stake.
“We said, we’re going to keep our services to this community,” James said. “Although we felt bad that we couldn’t help these people, we wouldn’t be doing our job if we couldn’t provide a full service to a family.”
After two years of pandemic loss, the village will be losing the Moore Funeral Home, on West Jamaica Avenue, which is expected to be razed to make way for an apartment complex, leaving Lieber as the sole remaining funeral home in the village. For their part, Paul, James and Kyle are looking to the future, planning to renovate and expand their facility, with the goal of continuing to ensure that with every death they deal with, they do so with caring and compassion.
