About a Miracle

Every year on December 15th, I especially remember Bernice.
I've talked a lot about Bernice, but I haven't told you yet about the miracle that happened. 
In 2006, I had been looking after Bernice for years.  By then I was her guardian, and I thought I knew all that I could about her.  I had read each page in the two 3-inch binders of her nursing home record.  I had spoken to the staff and the hospice volunteers who had known her in recent years.  I had listened to hours of partially intelligible information from the star herself.  As far as I knew from what I'd observed and been told, she had no living relatives at all.  No possessions whatsoever, aside from a cracked leather purse containing just dusty reading glasses and an ancient lipstick- firebrick red.  There were a few toys and movies, one pair of socks, that the nursing home had doled out to her.  That was it.
Now it's strange I know, to say that a person in her nineties, who had been on and off hospice for years, who could no longer sit up or feed herself, could die suddenly or unexpectedly. But that is what she did.  I honestly thought she had years left. The day she died, I was supposed to be taking her to the eye doctor.  I was supposed to be treating her to a lunch outing.  I was not supposed to be in the linoleum hallway with rumpled hair, everyone staring at me for an answer.
And so I'm a bit ashamed to say that I was completely unprepared.  I was still working hard on how to set things right in her life. I hadn't gotten to the part about preparing for her death.  And after the reality hit me, after my grief had registered, there I was. Fresh out of college, standing there in my flip-flops with a dead body on my hands.  What to do about that?
I had no money. She had no money. Certainly not enough to pay for any kind of service that involved the use of a hearse.  I had no idea what she wanted.  Her chart had a copy of her DNR, but no will or funereal preference of any kind.  The head nurse wanted that body gone now, and what was I supposed to do?  Carry it home until I could figure it all out?  There was a program a hospice worker told me about, where if you donate a body to science, to medical research, they will come and collect it, without charge.  After pacing and deliberating, panicking and weeping, I called them.
I felt cornered. I felt it was my only option. While I was grateful to have any option, I could not shake the feeling that it wasn't right. Bernice had been a fairly religious person from what I'd gathered, and I just didn't think she would have approved. I was so uneasy about the decision, something about it just felt wrong.
Back up. The day before- less than 24 hours before all of this- something amazing had happened.
I showed up to feed Bernice her dinner, and there was a note waiting for me.  I had been told that no one else ever visited Bernice.  But that wasn't quite true, as it turns out.  The note was left by the pastor of the church Bernice used to attend.  Knowing she had no family or living friends, the note read, this pastor had made a point to stop in every year or two and check on her. It had been several years, but he happened to have visited that day while I was out.  The nurses had told him about this girl who had become her guardian and caretaker, and he wanted to leave a note to say thank you.  Thank you for being there for Bernice, it read.  And also, he would like to talk with me. Could I please call sometime?  He left a number.
I called that evening, but no one answered.  I left a message.  Sometime after my message, in the night, Bernice died.
Fast forward to the next morning.  I am at the nurse's station, bent over the grimy phone with the curly cord.  I'm talking to the medical research people, answering questions about Bernice's health history. They are on the way to pick up her body.  I am nearly done, getting ready complete her registration, when my cell phone rings.  It is the pastor.
For some reason, maybe because it is the only other person in the world, it seemed, who ever knew and loved Bernice, it felt very important to take that call.  To hear the voice of this Other Person, and not be as alone in my grief.  I asked the woman on the phone to give me just a minute, and I answered.
The pastor introduced himself.  He told me how surprised he had been to learn about me, and that he had known Bernice for so many years.  How is she today, he asked.
Actually, I was sorry to tell him, she had passed away.  Of course he was shocked.
And then he said, "well then I guess it's more important than ever for you to know- I have her things".
Her Things.
Things?  She has things?
Having no one else, Bernice had left a few of her personal possessions with her church pastor when she entered the nursing home.  No one there had known.
Sometimes miraculous things happen, Peanuts.  Sometimes they just do.  Not only had this person, who hadn't visited in years, happened to have stopped by the day before she died and left me that number, he happened to call just as I was about to give her body away to science, and he happened to have a tupperwear box.  With a piece of masking tape across the front, labeled in her hand, "funeral plans".

Who would have guessed?
Not me.  Not hospice.  Certainly not the nursing home staff.  Not even the Pastor himself, who had never opened the box in the many years it had resided in his attic.  But just guess what was in that box?  The deed to a burial plot.  The one sharing a headstone with her husband.  It had been waiting decades for her.  It almost waited forever.
There was a whole plan, outlined and initialed in her curvy script.  Everything was decided. Everything was paid for in advance.
Well, almost everything.  It just so happened that the only thing not covered was the cost of etching the date of her death into the headstone.  $150.  And it just so happened that the exact amount of money in her nursing home account, the exact amount I "inherited" from Bernice, was $150.  And 34 cents. 
When I picked up the phone to cancel the registration and to call the mortuary she had chosen 20 years prior, my hands and voice were shaking.  With gratitude for that miracle.  That miracle of being able to do a final justice, give a final gift to my friend.
I went the next day to meet the pastor.  I sat down and had tea with him and his wife.  It was wonderful to hear them remember her, as she once was before her mind was blanketed in a hazy blanket of dementia, like snow.  By the time I met her I could only make out the vague shapes of what her personality and history really was.  But these people had seen some of those things before the snow fell.  Hearing them describe her was like getting a peek at what had been mostly hidden from me for years.  We talked a long time.  Then he brought out the rag-tag containers of her life's remnants.  Mostly old papers.  Some costume jewelry, mostly broken.  A few nostalgic treasures- her birth certificate, her high school diploma.  A couple of photographs.  All bundled in cracked rubber bands and sealed in yellow tupperwear, dented lock-boxes, and faded 1960's cosmetic cases.
I turned to leave- on my way to the mall.  The funeral home had called and asked for something to bury her in.  All her clothes belonged to the nursing home.  I was dreading this.  How could I pick something she would have liked?  As I began to leave, though, the pastor's wife stopped me.  There was one more thing, she remembered.  One dress.  A fancy blue one.  It had been Bernice's favorite.
She was buried in that dress, with no one but me under the pine tree, watching the casket drop.  Later I stood up in her old church and said a few words, though no one but the pastor himself and J, in the front row, knew well enough to realize how much the world should miss her.
It will always be a spot of rawness for me, like something that rubs and rubs against your skin too long, that I didn't do enough for Bernice.  That I didn't move fast enough, didn't push hard enough. That even after everything, I never did get her out of that awful place in time.  As many long days and late nights as I spent trying my best for her, I will never, never, never feel like I did as much as I should have to make things right for her in her lifetime.  Her death in that place is a constant little nagging reminder to me now, "Don't wait until tomorrow. You can't be sure it will be there". 
But this little miracle that happened, this appearance of the pastor, this materialization of arrangements already made, and being able to visit now and see her name there next to her husband's, just as she surely, unquestionably wanted it to be...it brings me some peace.  Maybe all my efforts were misguided and the whole time I knew Bernice I was just annoying the crap out of her.  I have no idea. But just maybe, if nothing else, I was meant to be in her life just so that things could come together exactly as they did, that things might be set right for her in death.  I find so much comfort in that, in knowing that there was one solid thing I was able to do for my friend that I'm sure made a difference to her.
It reminds me that even if we can't tell when we get started or when we're in the middle of our relationships with those we love, in the end-somehow- we matter.  We all have some purpose to fulfill, something important to give and be given by the people in our lives.  It reminds me that it's truly never to late to be there for each other, never too late to keep trying to make things right or better for someone.  And it reminds me that even, maybe especially, when things are bleak and hearts are breaking, miracles do happen.  They just do.