Part 1: The Sign on the Kitchen Door
Tamra had the sign taped to the kitchen door before the last hymn had faded from my ears.
It was a clean white sheet, printed off a computer, with neat ruled lines for names and times. Across the top, in a cheerful round font, it read:
FUNERAL LUNCHEON SIGN-UP. NEW PROCESS EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.
She stood before it with her hands folded at her waist, the way a person stands when she expects to be thanked.
“I know change is hard,” she said.
She was speaking to the five of us, standing there in our aprons in the church basement with nowhere left to put our hands.
“But I talked to Pastor Shay, and we both think it’s time for some fresh ideas down here. We’ve found a wonderful catering service out of Grand Island. Prairie Table. They do a lovely spread for sixty people. Soup to dessert. And nobody has to stand over a hot stove at seven in the morning when they ought to be upstairs grieving with everybody else.”
Louise set down the roasting pan she’d been holding since we walked in. It made a small sound against the counter. Not a slam. Just a sound.
“We’ve been doing the seven in the morning for thirty years, Tamra,” Louise said. “None of us minded.”
“I know,” Tamra said, and she did sound as though she meant it kindly. “That’s exactly why it’s time. You’ve all given so much. Now you can come sit with everybody else at the service. Doesn’t that sound nice?”
Nobody answered her.
Wanda stared at the coffee urns, the two big hundred-cup ones. Years ago, Eunice’s husband had bolted a special shelf to the wall so they’d never tip over. Marge stared at the floor. I stared at the sign.
I’d like to tell you I said something wise just then, the kind of line you remember later and feel proud of. I didn’t.
I untied my apron and folded it the way my mother taught me to fold a dish towel, in thirds and then in half. I hung it on the hook by the door, where it had hung for thirty years.
“Well,” I said. “I suppose we’ll see you at church, Tamra.”
Then I climbed the stairs into the sanctuary and sat in the pew where my husband would have been sitting if he’d lived to see this day.
I didn’t cry until I got home.
My name is Opal Deane, and I’m seventy-two years old. I’ve lived in this little Nebraska town all my life. It’s so small you could walk every street in the time it takes a pot roast to brown.
For thirty years, ever since I was forty-two and had just buried my own mother, I’ve been one of five women who cooked the funeral lunch at Zion Lutheran Church: Louise Pruitt, Wanda Keel, Eunice Brandt, Marge Holt, and me.
We were never an official committee, and nobody elected us. We were simply the ones who showed up the first time somebody died, and then kept on showing up. We showed up through our own husbands’ funerals and each other’s, and through every farmer and schoolteacher and baby this town lost, until it became just what we did, the way breathing is just what you do.
I should tell you how it started, because it matters later.
My mother died thirty-one years ago in February, in a cold spell so hard the frost had gone four feet into the ground. They had to break open her grave with a backhoe. Forty people came back to the church basement after the graveside service, half frozen and shaking snow off their boots.
And there was nothing there but one coffee urn that somebody’s daughter-in-law had thought to plug in.
Louise’s husband had died the year before, and she’d stood in that same basement at his funeral with nothing either. She never forgot that hollow feeling, a room full of people who’d come to hold up your grief and found nothing on the table.
So on the morning my mother was buried, Louise turned up on my front porch at six a.m. with two casserole dishes of scalloped ham and a quart jar of her own canned green beans.
“Opal,” she said. “Get your coat. We’ve got a lunch to put on.”
And that was that.
Wanda and Eunice arrived within the hour. Marge joined us two years later, after her mother-in-law passed. She saw what we did that day and never left.
We built it the way you build anything in a small town, out of whatever you have. We kept a funeral shelf in the church pantry, stocked all year round so we’d never be caught short: canned green beans, canned corn, dried noodles for the hotdish, two hundred paper napkins, and a case of instant coffee in case the real grounds ran low.
Inside the pantry door we taped a list of who in the congregation was diabetic, who couldn’t have dairy since her gallbladder came out, and who couldn’t eat onions. That way nobody with a fresh loss on them had to worry whether the scalloped potatoes would make them sick.
And we knew something that nobody ever had to write down. A funeral lunch isn’t really about the food. It’s about a widow sitting down at a folding table while somebody sets a plate in front of her without her having to ask, so that for twenty minutes, in the worst week of her life, she doesn’t have to take care of one single thing.
That’s what it was for. That’s all it was ever for.
Pastor Shay came to Zion eighteen months ago. He was young and earnest, fresh out of seminary in St. Louis, and the first called pastor we’d had in eleven years, ever since old Pastor Ohlrich finally retired at seventy-nine when his hip gave out climbing the chancel steps.
Our congregation had shrunk the way these little country churches shrink, from forty families down to twenty-two. The call committee prayed over it for months, then voted to bring in somebody young, hoping a young family in the parsonage might draw other young families back.
Pastor Shay brought his wife, Tamra. She was twenty-nine, bright and busy and full of ideas.
For the first year she mostly left the kitchen to us. She helped on some Sundays and learned our names. She learned that Eunice takes her coffee black and that Marge can’t eat onions.
Then in September she went to a church conference in Lincoln, something about revitalizing small congregations. And she came back with a binder.
I don’t say that to make fun of her. I’ve come to believe that binder came from a good heart that just didn’t know this town yet.
One of the sessions, she later told the church council, was about volunteer burnout, and how churches run their most faithful people into the ground. The same handful of people do the same unpaid work for decades until they quietly die or quit, and the church has built nothing that outlasts them.
She looked at five women in their sixties and seventies, climbing up and down the basement stairs with roasting pans at six in the morning, and she saw burnout.
She didn’t see what my friend Sharon Lindqvist would have seen in about thirty seconds. Sharon used to dispatch for the county sheriff before she retired, and she told me later over coffee exactly what she’d have seen: five women who had never once complained or asked to be let off. They would have told you right to your face that carrying a roaster down those stairs wasn’t a cross they were bearing. It was a gift, and they were glad to give it.
None of us told Tamra that.
Weeks later, when I finally told Sharon the whole story, she asked me the obvious question, the one any sensible person would ask.
“Opal, why in the world didn’t you just say so? Why didn’t you tell that woman plain? We’re not tired. We like it. Leave us be.”
Here’s the truth of it. It isn’t a flattering truth, but it’s the honest one.
Pastor Shay was twenty-nine years old. The council had voted him in six to one, after years of praying our little dying church could survive another decade. And Tamra was his wife. In a town this size, the pastor’s wife carries weight, whether she asks for it or not.
If five old women had stood up in a council meeting and said no, we will not give up our kitchen, it wouldn’t have looked like what it was, which was love for a thing we’d built with our own hands. It would have looked like the old guard blocking the young pastor’s wife on her very first real project. That’s the exact story every struggling little church is terrified of: old women clinging to the stove while the whole congregation dies out from under them.
We’d watched two other small churches in our county split clean in half over smaller things than a sign-up sheet, and we weren’t willing to be the reason Zion became the third.
So we untied our aprons and didn’t fuss. We told ourselves that was humility, and some of it even was.
What it cost us, we didn’t tell anybody either.
Wanda’s husband, LeRoy, died nine years ago, and that kitchen was the only place left in town where Wanda still laughed out loud.
Eunice’s eyesight had gotten bad enough that she’d quietly stopped driving at night. Tuesday morning kitchen prep was one of the few times left in her week when somebody still needed her for something besides a ride.
Marge buried her grandson three years back, a boy named Tyler who died of an infection that shouldn’t have killed a healthy nineteen-year-old. She told me once that cooking the lunch for his funeral was the only thing that got her out of bed that week, because grief with your hands busy is a different animal than grief with your hands empty.
And I’ll say my own truth plainly. My Hollis has been gone six years now. That kitchen was where I still felt like somebody’s wife, somebody’s neighbor, somebody who mattered to this town in a way that had nothing to do with being alone in a quiet house at night.
Tamra couldn’t have known any of that. We never told her.
So we went to church on Sundays and sat in our regular pews: Louise two rows behind me, Wanda across the aisle, Eunice and Marge up front where Eunice can see the hymn board. And we watched the sign-up sheet on the kitchen door fill with names.
The next three funerals were small ones, old-timers whose families had plenty of their own people to cook for them anyway. So Prairie Table’s lovely spreads went mostly fine. There was soup in disposable bowls, little plastic trays of cold cuts and cheese cubes, and a grocery store sheet cake.
Nothing anybody complained about. Nothing anybody remembered, either.
We came to those funerals in our good dresses instead of our aprons and sat with everybody else, the way Tamra said would be nice.
It wasn’t nice. It was just different, the way a room is different when somebody moves the furniture and you keep walking into the spot where the chair used to be.
Then, in the second week of October, Cole Haney’s wife died.
I hadn’t known Cole well before that week. He and his wife, Dana, had moved to our county eighteen months earlier, about the same time as Pastor Shay. They were so new that most folks still called them “the young couple renting the old Petersen place out on the gravel.”
Cole worked the loading dock at the grain co-op. Dana was expecting their first baby in the spring.
She went into the hospital in Grand Island on a Tuesday with what the doctors first took for a bad headache. By Thursday she was gone, from an aneurysm, the kind that gives almost no warning and takes almost no time. The baby didn’t make it either.
Cole had no family in the county. His mother had died when he was in high school, and his father lived three states away and hadn’t spoken to him in years over some old grievance Cole never talked about. Dana’s people were from Ohio, too far away and too short on gas money to come for anything but the service itself.
He was twenty-six years old.
At the funeral he stood in the front pew at Zion with nobody beside him. Nobody at all, just Pastor Shay’s hand resting on his shoulder.
In thirty years of funerals, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man look that alone in a room full of people.
