A call I won't forget

Three in the morning. A woman in Pasadena. Her husband of fifty-one years had just died in the next room. There was nobody else in the house.

I remember the sound of her voice more than her words. She wasn't crying yet. She was just quiet in a way that told me she'd been sitting next to him for a while before she picked up the phone.

I'd gotten the call forwarded from our answering service. Those forwarded calls at 3 a.m. — you know the next hour of your life is going to change someone's. You put your shoes on fast.

What she needed first

She needed to be told what to do, and she needed to be told it could wait a minute.

The first thing I asked her was whether he was on hospice. She said yes. Good. That meant no 911, no paramedics in the living room, no one treating her kitchen like a crime scene. The hospice nurse just needed a call, and the nurse would come first and pronounce him.

The second thing I asked was whether she had someone who could come be with her. She said her daughter was in Portland and couldn't fly down until the next day. She had a neighbor, Rose, two doors down, who she'd known for decades.

I told her to call Rose. Not now, but after we hung up. I told her the hospice nurse was on the way and that we'd come about an hour after that. I told her she could sit with him until we arrived. She didn't have to get up and do anything. She didn't have to clean or make coffee or get dressed.

She said okay in a voice that sounded relieved just to have been given permission.

The next ninety minutes

Our dispatch driver, Enrique, got there at 4:35 a.m. The hospice nurse had come, pronounced, and left. Rose was in the kitchen with her. There was a pot of coffee I bet Rose made.

Enrique doesn't do what people in old movies do. He doesn't wear a dark suit at 4 in the morning. He wears what he'd wear to pick up his daughter from softball practice, because people who are in grief do not need theatrics. He said hello, he introduced himself, he asked her if she wanted a minute with her husband before we transferred him to our vehicle. She said she'd already had her minute.

He was careful. He was quiet. The transfer from bed to gurney to vehicle took maybe eight minutes. In corporate funeral service, you're trained to be efficient, which usually means fast. What I've learned since opening my own place is that efficient and fast aren't the same thing. Efficient means nothing gets dropped. Nothing gets rushed. The family isn't left with the memory of someone being hurried out of the house.

Enrique left her with a folder — our card, a one-page outline of the next few days, our direct line. He told her I'd call her at 9 a.m. after the sun came up.

I called her at 9:03.

What we did right, I think

I didn't push her to make decisions that night. She didn't need to pick an urn or sign authorizations or tell me whether she wanted a small gathering. She needed to get through the next three hours. That's all.

When we met the next afternoon — her daughter had landed — we went through everything in about forty minutes. She picked a simple wooden urn. She didn't want a service. She wanted his ashes scattered at a specific spot on Mt. Wilson that they used to drive up to on their anniversary.

I did not sell her a package. I did not show her an upgrade menu. The $1,195 is $1,195, and if she wanted the keepsake pendant too, that was $55 more, and she decided she did want one for her daughter.

That was it. That was the whole thing.

What I think about afterward

I think about Rose. I think about the fact that she walked over to be with a woman who had just become a widow at 3 a.m., and she stayed through the hardest hours of her friend's life, and she probably won't be mentioned in any obituary. Most of what matters in these moments never shows up on a bill.

I also think about whether what we do — this work, this particular small business — actually helps anyone. Most days I believe it does. On the night of this call, at 4:35 a.m., when Enrique had gotten there before anybody else had to, and this woman didn't have to make four more phone calls to four more companies, and the hospice nurse had cleared out and we'd cleared the body out before the sun came up so she wouldn't have to see him in the morning light — on that night, I was sure.

That's the whole job, I think. The pricing and the paperwork and the transportation logistics are all in service of that one thing. When we get it right, a family gets to focus on each other instead of on us.

A note, a year later

She called me three months after the funeral to say thank you again, and to tell me she'd been going up to Mt. Wilson on their anniversary and sitting at the spot where she scattered him. She said it felt like the right place. She said the pendant was around her daughter's neck.

I put the phone down after that call and sat for a while. Then I called Enrique and told him I was giving him a raise.