In Lieu of Flowers

Romie Ballard wrote the line at the mahogany desk in the parlor on Tuesday morning at ten past eight.

Rosemary Curran "Romie" Ballard has lived at 314 Xavier Drive in Bardstown, Kentucky, in a small red-brick colonial with dark green shutters and a slate front step her son Danny re-set the summer of 2019, since the August of 1973. She was married for fifty-three years, on the fourteenth of June in 1973, to James Elliott "Jim" Ballard — Bellarmine '68, an ROTC first lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps at Fort Gordon from the fall of 1968 through the winter of 1970, and a mash-bill supervisor at Heaven Hill Distillery from the spring of 1971 until the Friday afternoon of his retirement party in the small mash-bill office off the loading dock in the March of 2011.

Jim passed on the last Saturday morning of June, at four-forty-one, at home, in the small back bedroom on the second floor with the window that looks out on the sugar maple in the side yard. Nettie Bevill, RN — the Hosparus Health nurse who had been with them since the second Tuesday of May — was in the room. Romie was in the room. Their old black lab Bucky, thirteen, was on the braided rag rug at the foot of the bed.

The vigil was Sunday. The funeral Mass was Monday at ten. Father Terrence Cooney celebrated. The reception was in Marion Hall on the parish grounds, on the folding tables the Altar Society has been setting up in that hall since the summer of 1954.

On Tuesday morning, at ten past eight, Romie Ballard picked up the phone at the small maple wall telephone table by the kitchen door and called Barbara Nally at Barlow-Bonnycastle Funeral Home on North Third Street.

What Barbara typed on Tuesday afternoon

Barbara Nally — Bardstown High class of 1979, front desk at Barlow-Bonnycastle Funeral Home since the September of 1993 — has typed roughly nine thousand obituaries into a small Dell laptop on the front-desk return under the west-facing window. She types them plain. She types them right. When the family reads the draft back to her on the phone the second time, at the end, she asks one small quiet question:

And where would you like the memorials to go, honey?

Romie had thought about it for three days.

She had thought about it in the small back bedroom, on the Sunday morning after the vigil, when the sun came in on the empty made bed. She had thought about it on the Monday afternoon, in the car, on the drive out to St. Joseph's Cemetery on Boston Road, with Danny driving. She had thought about it standing at the sink on the Tuesday morning at six, with her hands in the dishwater and Bucky's tail against her calf.

She named three.

The Basilica of St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral Music Fund, in Bardstown, for the choir Jim had sung tenor with, second row on the pulpit side, from the September of 1973 until his voice went in the March of last year. Bellarmine University in Louisville, where Jim had gone on a partial ROTC scholarship in the fall of 1964 because the tuition was seven hundred dollars a semester and his father, a millwright at the American Standard plant in Louisville, could pay half. Hospice of Nelson County, out on Templin Avenue, for Nettie Bevill and the three other nurses who had, in Romie's plain reading of the last seven weeks, given her back her husband long enough to say goodbye.

On the Tuesday afternoon at two-eighteen, Barbara typed the line into the small Dell laptop under the west-facing window:

In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to the Music Fund at the Basilica of St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral, 310 W. Stephen Foster Ave., Bardstown, KY 40004; the Bellarmine University Annual Fund (James E. Ballard '68), 2001 Newburg Rd., Louisville, KY 40205; or Hospice of Nelson County, 108 Templin Ave., Bardstown, KY 40004.

She emailed the file to the Kentucky Standard at three-oh-four. She emailed it to the Courier-Journal obituary desk at three-oh-six. She uploaded it to Legacy.com at three-oh-eight. She printed a copy for the family folder in the small cherry filing cabinet by the coffee maker.

The obituary ran in the Kentucky Standard on Thursday morning at four-fifteen. It ran on Legacy.com on the same Thursday afternoon at one-eleven. It ran in the Courier-Journal on Friday morning, at the top of page B-6, above the fold, under a small photograph of Jim in the summer of 1974, in a light blue open-collared shirt, on the front porch at Xavier Drive, holding Danny on his hip.

What the mail carrier brought on the second Monday

For the six weeks after the obituary ran, the small brass mailbox at the end of the walk on Xavier Drive was full every day at eleven-oh-seven.

Sympathy cards. Notes on Crane's stationery. Mass cards from four different parishes across three states. A folded copy of a hymn program from the choir at St. Aloysius in Pewee Valley, sixteen miles up the road, that Jim had guest-sung with in the fall of 1998. Two hundred and forty-seven envelopes in the first three weeks.

Some were addressed to Romie. Most were not.

Most were envelopes Romie had never seen. They were addressed, in the plain way a funeral director writes on a small paper card the funeral home hands out at the visitation, to the Basilica of St. Joseph Music Fund and Bellarmine University and Hospice of Nelson County. They went into a small basket on the sideboard in the dining room. Each Friday morning at nine, Romie's daughter-in-law Jennifer drove them down to the parish office, up to Louisville, and out to Templin Avenue.

By the second Monday of August, seven weeks after the obituary ran, the three offices had, together, received:

The Basilica Music Fund: $6,850 from 41 individuals.

Hospice of Nelson County: $19,400 from 108 individuals.

Bellarmine University: $47,325 from 213 individuals — the largest single memorial-gift response the annual fund had recorded in the calendar year.

What the CRM at Bellarmine shows on the second Monday

On the second Monday of August, on the fourth floor of a converted red-brick building on the Bellarmine campus, the associate director of annual giving opens the weekly gifts report at eight fifty-seven a.m.

There are 213 rows under tribute — J. E. Ballard '68.

The first column is donor name. The second is amount. The third is first-time donor: Y/N. The fourth is linked constituent record: Y/N.

Of the 213 rows, 148 are first-time donors to Bellarmine. Of those 148, 91 have no linked constituent record. Of those 91, the CRM assigns them, in a small quiet nightly batch job, to the unlinked memorial gifts holding bin — a queue nobody on the fourth floor has cleaned out since the third week of April.

The 213th row is a $10,000 gift from a Louisville estate-planning attorney named Coleman Rutherford, Bellarmine '67, whom the university's records list as last-contacted 2014. Rutherford was Jim's roommate in Newman Hall in the fall of 1964. He drove down for the funeral Mass on Monday. He was in the fourth pew from the front, on the pulpit side, in a charcoal suit with a small Bellarmine lapel pin his wife Colleen had pressed for him on the ironing board in the mudroom at six-fifteen that morning.

The CRM has Rutherford, Coleman P., Bellarmine class of 1967, Louisville KY, gift $10,000, tribute J. E. Ballard '68.

The CRM does not have roommate, Newman Hall, fall of 1964.

It does not have fourth pew, pulpit side, charcoal suit.

It does not have the small Bellarmine lapel pin Colleen pressed on the ironing board at six-fifteen.

The obituary is the prospect list

The in lieu of line at the bottom of an American obituary is the most self-directed piece of philanthropic writing a family will produce in its lifetime.

It is written, in the average American funeral home, forty-eight to seventy-two hours after the death, at a small desk under a west-facing window, in the plain unhurried language of a widow who has, in the last three days, sat with the specific question that no fundraising office in the country will ever ask her directly: when someone asks me where to send it, what will I say?

The answer is three lines long. It names, on average, two-point-one nonprofit organizations. It runs in at least one small-town paper, sometimes a metropolitan paper, and, in almost every case in 2026, a national legacy site. It is read, in the first seventy-two hours after it prints, by roughly four hundred people in the deceased's network — old classmates, old colleagues, second cousins, the wife of a college roommate, the son of a Sunday-school teacher — and each one of them, if the ask on the memorial card is plain, will write a check.

Every one of those four hundred people is a warm prospect for the two-point-one organizations named on the line.

The line is a prospect list a widow assembled, in her own hand, at a mahogany desk in a parlor on Xavier Drive in Bardstown, Kentucky, on a Tuesday morning in June.

Nobody at any of the three organizations was on the phone with her when she wrote it.

Barbara Nally at Barlow-Bonnycastle was.

What Rōmy does with the in-lieu-of line

Rōmy reads the obituaries.

Every morning at seven-eleven, Rōmy reads the previous day's obituary listings across the twenty-eight legacy aggregators and the one thousand three hundred and forty-two small-town daily and weekly papers whose archives she has been quietly indexing in the background since the March of 2025. She reads the top of the notice. She reads the paragraph in the middle. She reads, most carefully, the twenty-three-word line at the bottom.

She matches each named nonprofit to a client tenant. She matches the deceased to any linked alumni or donor record. She matches the surviving spouse, the surviving children, and — where the small biographical paragraph permits — the surviving classmates, colleagues, and lifelong friends against the client's constituent database.

On the Monday morning at nine-oh-eight after Jim Ballard's obituary runs, the associate director of annual giving at Bellarmine opens her screen and sees, at the top of her list, a small quiet note:

Kentucky Standard, Thursday morning: paid notice for James Elliott Ballard ('68, ROTC, Newman Hall fall 1964, spouse Rosemary "Romie" Curran Ballard, three children, seven grandchildren). Bellarmine named on the in-lieu-of line as the second of three memorial recipients. Estimated first-72-hour gift response, based on comparable notices in the Bardstown–Louisville corridor since 2019, is 140–210 individuals and $34K–$58K. Highest-signal single name in Jim's network: Coleman P. Rutherford ('67, Louisville, estate-planning attorney, freshman-year roommate Newman Hall fall 1964). Rutherford has not had a warm handwritten note from the annual fund since 2014. Suggested: one plain notecard, this week, in your own hand, to 4106 Cherokee Rd., Louisville — mentioning Jim by first name, Newman Hall by name, and thanking Coleman, quietly, for whatever he chooses to give. Do not, this quarter, put a case for support in the envelope. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The card goes out on Friday morning.

Coleman reads it, at the kitchen island in Louisville, on Monday afternoon.

By Homecoming, in the third week of October, he has driven down to the fourth-floor office in the converted red-brick building for a coffee with the associate director. He sits with her for forty minutes. He tells her, quietly, that he has been thinking about a small provision in a document at his own firm in Louisville — a document, he says, in which he has, until this year, named only his three children.

She listens.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before anything else, do one small unfashionable thing.

Pull, from your CRM, the twelve alumni or major donors who have died in the last ninety days. If you cannot remember all twelve, ask the woman at the front desk. She keeps the list on a small pink Post-it under the corner of her monitor. She writes each name down on the morning the funeral home calls.

For each of the twelve, open a browser tab to Legacy.com and search the name. If it is not on Legacy, search the town's small daily paper. If it is not there, call the funeral home. Ask them, kindly, whether the family has placed a paid notice yet.

When you find the notice, scroll all the way to the bottom.

Read the in lieu of line. Read it in the plain unhurried way Barbara Nally typed it into the small Dell laptop at Barlow-Bonnycastle at two-eighteen on Tuesday afternoon.

Read the names of the other nonprofits on the line.

If your organization is on it, do the small thing. Send a plain notecard, this week, in your own hand, to the surviving spouse. Say the deceased's name once. Say a specific thing from the obituary that only somebody who read the whole notice would know — the summer job on Kent Island, the tenor line in the choir, the fly-tying bench in the mudroom. Then — and this is the part your director will not like — do not put a reply envelope in the card.

Say thank you. Say his name. Say it in the plain language of a person who was paying attention.

If your organization is not on the line, close the tab, quietly, and remember, the next time you write your own case for support, that a widow at a mahogany desk on a Tuesday morning in Bardstown, Kentucky, was asked where would you like the memorials to go, honey? — and she did not, this time, say your name.

Ask yourself why.

Romie wrote the line at the mahogany desk in the parlor on Tuesday morning at ten past eight.

Barbara typed it into the small Dell laptop on the front-desk return at two-eighteen.

The Kentucky Standard ran it at four-fifteen on Thursday morning, in twelve-point Bookman, at the bottom of the paid notice on page A-7.

Turn to page A-7. ♡