The Funeral They Said Was For Family

The Care Center

My father’s heart began to fail in October. It was slow at first, then not. By Thanksgiving he was in the care center on the edge of town, a low brick building with a glass vestibule and a fish tank in the lobby, and by the first week of December the doctor had used the word “weeks.”

Marcy took charge of the visitor list. I knew that within an hour of arriving, because I stood at the front desk with my coat still on and a nurse who did not want to meet my eyes told me that “the family has requested immediate relatives only.”

“I’m his daughter.”

So I stood in that vestibule beside the fish tank and waited while a nurse’s aide went down the hall and came back and said that Mrs. Benson was in the room with him and would prefer if I came another day. I came another day. That day Marcy was at the beauty parlor, and they let me in, and I sat for forty minutes beside my father’s bed holding his hand, which had gone to paper and bone.

The next morning there was a laminated card taped to the door of his room. It had been typed. It said VISITORS BY APPROVAL OF MRS. BENSON ONLY. When I came on Friday, a different nurse told me, kindly, that she had been instructed to call the wife if I showed up. She did not want to. She asked me, very quietly, to understand that she had a job.

He died on a Tuesday, a little before dawn. Marcy did not call me. Doyle did.

“Lynn.” Just my name. Then a long silence on the line. Then: “He’s gone, honey. They called me because I was down as the second number. I figured you ought to hear it from somebody who loved him.”

I drove to Fairbury in the dark. By the time I got to the care center, Marcy had already been there, and gone, and had left word at the front desk that the arrangements were handled and that I would be “informed of the details.” The details, when they finally came, arrived as a text message from a number I did not know. It gave the date and the hour of the service and the name of the funeral home. It did not say that I was welcome. It did not say that I was not.