Thread: A sad way to conclude

Published on Sunday, July 16, 2006

A sad way to conclude

By Andrew Barksdale
Staff writer

A portable radio played soft music the day Lilian Pierce died.
A heart monitor beeped. A ventilator whooshed.
In an intensive-care room at Womack Army Medical Center, Pierce’s eyes were closed, her auburn-gray hair combed.
Then at 11:57 a.m., she left this world as quietly as she had lived in it.
A 58-year-old widow, Pierce became one of only a few people each year who fall into Cumberland County’s hands after they die.
Pierce was childless and disconnected from her relatives 4,300 miles away.
She never bothered to plan for her burial, so she was cremated at taxpayer expense. Her ashes were put in a small black plastic box.
State law requires the local Department of Social Services to handle the bodies that no one else wants.
“It’s a sad way for someone’s life to conclude,” said Philip Leary, an adult services section supervisor at Social Services.
Since 2004, the county has paid $3,047 to cremate seven unclaimed bodies. A few other unclaimed bodies since then have been donated to science or a mortuary school, but the county doesn’t track those records.
The mostly anonymous and efficient process involves some phone calls and paperwork.
No elegant funeral. No eulogies. Just a line on the obituary page.
Pierce was more fortunate than most. At least she had a few friends and neighbors.
She wouldn’t die alone, and her ashes wouldn’t be lost.
Lilian Wohlfart Pierce’s story begins in Germany, where she was born in 1947 and would later meet and fall in love with an older man, Franklin “Frank” Pierce. He was an American soldier stationed in Germany. They married in the 1970s, and she moved to the States.
Their marriage was short. Frank Pierce died in 1979 of a heart attack while stationed again in Germany. He was 41.
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Lilian Pierce was 32 and living in Florence, S.C., at the time. She moved to the Fayetteville area a year or two later to live with a boyfriend. That relationship was short, too. By the early 1980s, she was on her own again and had settled in Spring Lake.
Pierce remained single and eventually became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She spoke English with a German accent. She had lost contact with her relatives in Germany except for her mother, who sometimes visited.
Then, about 15 years ago, Pierce’s mother died, too. Another loved one gone.
‘Up and down’ moods
Neighbor Ellen Campbell described Pierce as candid, often moody and crushed over the loss of her husband and mother.
“She was just up and down,” Campbell said, adding that Pierce’s ailing health affected her moods.
She would become depressed one minute, with little interest in socializing. Then, all of a sudden, she would be chattering and laughing again.
Pierce smoked when she could afford the cheapest brand of cigarettes, and she drank rum and Coke. She suffered from bronchitis and was short of breath at times.
Harold Carr, a 40-year-old plumber, was her roommate. They shared the 1,100-square-foot house she bought in 1993 for $49,500. He is still living there.
Carr said they were neighborhood friends, and he moved in last winter after getting a divorce. Pierce cooked for Carr, and he lived there rent-free. He drove her on errands and sometimes to Mass. He also cut the grass.
“She was a kind-hearted person,” he said. “She would do for you before she would do for herself.”
Some people took advantage of her generosity. Once, Pierce loaned a couple her washer and dryer until she moved into her new home. When she went to retrieve her appliances, the couple refused to return them.
Another neighbor introduced Pierce to NASCAR. She soon fell in love with Jeff Gordon. She cheered when his rainbow-colored No. 24 sped around the tracks. She camped in front of the television set on Sundays. Her friends sometimes joined her in the living room with its pink walls and pictures she had knitted. When Gordon captured the checkered flag, she would dance with her dogs on their hind legs.
Pierce had other habits. She liked to try new recipes and brag about the meals she whipped up, and she entered frequent sweepstakes.
“Her main goal in life was to win a million dollars and take care of her friends,” Campbell said.
Pierce never won any money. She worked odd jobs. She was a hotel housekeeper, and was a cook on post and at a Waffle House. She also received a monthly military pension of about $1,000.
Help from friends
Erika Wynn, another neighbor, said she helped Pierce buy dog food or pay a late bill. Other friends did the same for Pierce, who refused to seek public assistance.
“She didn’t like to take charity from someone,” Wynn said. “She would rather go without and eat nothing.”
Wynn inherited Pierce’s house. But, Wynn said, the house needs a lot of repairs, and she expects the property to go into foreclosure.
Pierce’s health began to decline last Thanksgiving, but she rarely complained. “She just kept on pushing,” Campbell said.
On March 6, two friends, Donald and Carmen Ryals of Erwin, paid Pierce a visit. They didn’t like what they saw. She was pale and unable to move off her couch. They called an ambulance.
Because she had a military identification card, she was admitted to Womack. By the second day, doctors kept her sedated. She would never communicate again.
But her friends visited her often anyway. Doctors told them that they had performed four surgeries. Donald Ryals said doctors told them more than normal because she had no relatives.
On her deathbed
A few hours before she died, doctors called her friends so they could visit one last time.
Five of them gathered around her bed.
Carmen Ryals squeezed Pierce’s limp hand. “You go home to your mama and God,” she said.
According to her death certificate, Pierce died of a bacterial infection. Her intestines had become obstructed and stopped working.
In the days after her death, her friends talked about raising $3,500 for a casket. They wanted to bury her 30 minutes away in a Buies Creek cemetery owned by the Ryals family.
Although Pierce hadn’t discussed her funeral arrangements, Campbell said Pierce would have preferred burial over cremation.
That wish would go unheard.
Womack officials called the county Department of Social Services on April 21, a Friday, about Pierce’s unclaimed body. The cases are so rare that Social Services assigns the task to whoever is working that day.
The call went to social worker Sharon Glover, who had never handled an unclaimed body before. She learned from a supervisor what to do, then returned Womack’s call the following Monday.
Womack, it turns out, had already contacted Pierce’s brother and sister-in-law in Germany through an interpreter.
“They didn’t want to claim the body or have anything to do with that,” Glover said.
More common is when the police call Social Services about a homeless man, or a nursing home says it has a deceased patient with no relatives.
A social worker then does detective work on the computer and over the phone to verify whether anyone will claim the body. In some instances, the family can’t afford the funeral expenses, so the county pays the bill anyway.
Because Womack had contacted Pierce’s relatives in Germany, Glover’s only task was to sign the paperwork for the body and get the $580 cremation payment authorized. She chose Rogers & Breece Funeral Home on Ramsey Street.
“It’s close, and we’ve used them before,” she said.
A few weeks slipped by, and the friends planning her funeral never heard from Womack or Social Services about the body.
One morning, on April 28, they read her one-line obituary by Rogers & Breece. They made some phone calls and learned she had been cremated.
“We were all disappointed,” Donald Ryals said.
Her burial
But Campbell was determined to do something for Pierce. She persuaded Social Services to authorize the funeral home to give her the ashes. She took the black box home to the same Spring Lake neighborhood where Pierce lived.
On the muggy late afternoon of May 25, four of the five friends who had visited Pierce in the hospital — Campbell, Wynn and the Ryalses — gathered at the private cemetery in Buies Creek. Donald Ryals had dug a hole 4 feet deep near the woods. Traffic from nearby U.S. 421 whizzed by.
They put the box in the grave. Campbell leaned over it and said, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Rest in peace.”
Two of the friends said the Lord’s prayer in German, and the others simultaneously recited it in English.
“Our father who art in heaven...”
They laid yellow daisies and red plastic roses around the grave and poked a miniature American flag in the ground.
“I wish there would have been something better, but it cost too much,” Wynn said. “She probably would not have liked it, but at least she has a place.”
The next week, Donald Ryals returned with a concrete tombstone he had made at home.
“I feel like, with her being a friend, it was our duty to do everything that we possibly could,” he would say later.
He painted the marker gray, then he used stencil lettering to spray her name, birth date and the date she died in black paint.
Only he misspelled her last name: “Perice.”
When he realized his mistake a week later, he drove back to the cemetery and repainted the tombstone with the correct spelling.
Lilian Pierce was given a proper funeral after all. And her friends have a place to visit and remember her.

http://www.fayettevillenc.com/article?id=237612

OK pass the tissues. What a sweet story.

Dixie

I'll have a tissue...God is good.