The Names Under Pallbearers

On a Saturday morning in the second week of October, at ten fifty-two, six men in charcoal suits carry a walnut casket down the granite steps of St. Patrick's on North Main Street in Bellefontaine, Ohio, to a hearse from Eichholtz-Daring parked at the curb behind a police cruiser with its lights on and its siren off.

They are, from the head of the casket clockwise:

Gary Detweiler, fifty-eight, the deceased's younger brother, who drove up from Marysville that morning in the pickup he has driven since 1997.

Peter Cameron, sixty-one, who sat next to the deceased in the Bellefontaine High School class of 1983 for four years of alphabetical seating and became, in the September of that year, his roommate in a corner double on the third floor of Elliott Hall at Ohio Wesleyan.

Reverend Douglas Whitmer, seventy-seven, retired pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of West Liberty — not Catholic, not asked to speak, asked instead to carry — who baptized the deceased's two daughters in 1988 and 1991 and who has, for thirty-eight years, been the man the family called first.

James Detweiler, twenty-nine, the deceased's oldest son.

Michael Detweiler, twenty-six, the deceased's youngest son.

Thomas Griffin, fifty-nine, of Griffin & Sons Hardware on the corner of Sandusky and Columbus Avenue — where the deceased bought, on a Saturday morning in the March of 1994, the ten-penny nails and the fourteen feet of two-by-four he needed to build the back-porch railing his wife would sit on with her sisters for the next thirty-one summers.

The six names were printed in the Bellefontaine Examiner on Thursday afternoon, in six-point Times, in a single italicized line under the caption Pallbearers, on page A-4, above a photograph the family had submitted of the deceased at forty-three, laughing at something outside the frame.

It is the shortest, truest, most useful sentence anyone will publish about Robert Detweiler in a five-hundred-mile radius for the rest of the calendar year.

Nobody at the diocesan foundation office in Columbus, ninety miles south, has read it.

Six is a small number in a small font

A pallbearer list has, by ancient convention, six names.

Six is a small number. It is smaller than the guest list at any wedding, smaller than the Christmas-card list of any grandmother, smaller than the phone tree at any parish. It is chosen — not by the deceased, who is beyond such considerations, but by the widow, the eldest child, and the funeral director, sometimes over the black coffee at a small kitchen table on the Monday after the death, sometimes on the phone at nine at night, sometimes in a low voice in the corner of the visitation room while the third cousins from Sandusky are still eating the deviled eggs.

The six are chosen with more care than any other line on the funeral program. They are the six the family wants next to the casket, physically, at the moment the casket is carried out. They are, in the plain and unsentimental language of a small county in central Ohio, the six who mattered.

They are the deepest, cleanest social graph the family will ever publish.

They are printed, once, in a paper that costs a dollar-fifty at the Circle K on North Main.

What the CRM knows on Friday morning

The CRM at the diocesan foundation in Columbus knows, on Friday morning, that Robert J. Detweiler of Bellefontaine — class of 1979, St. Patrick's parishioner, giving since 1994, last gift $250 in November on the memorial of his mother — is deceased. The CRM knows because the parish secretary, Marge Kellerman, updated the sacramental register on Wednesday morning and the diocesan data feed picked it up at four a.m. Thursday.

The CRM has, in its Notes field, three words: Deceased — see obituary.

Nobody has clicked through.

The CRM does not know who Gary Detweiler is. The CRM does not know Peter Cameron drove five hours from Cleveland to be at the church at ten. The CRM does not know Reverend Whitmer is not Catholic. The CRM does not know Tom Griffin's hardware store has been on the corner of Sandusky and Columbus since 1963, that his father sold Robert Detweiler the ten-penny nails, or that Tom's granddaughter Grace was on the varsity swim team at the Catholic school across the county line and won the two-hundred fly her junior year with a bracket-pass Robert Detweiler shouted for from three lanes up in the bleachers.

The CRM does not know that James Detweiler, twenty-nine, works in equity research at a firm in Columbus whose founding partner set up, in 2011, a donor-advised fund at the Columbus Foundation.

The CRM does not know that Michael Detweiler, twenty-six, is engaged to Rachel Bishop of Wilmington, Ohio, whose grandmother left, in a trust her Cleveland attorney is right now finalizing, a residuary interest that will name a Catholic education foundation.

Six names in six-point Times. Not one of them is in the file.

The obituary is the org chart

Every institution has an org chart. Most of them are wrong.

The org chart the diocesan foundation works from was drawn in 2019 by a consultant in Chicago on a whiteboard in a hotel conference room. The org chart the family in Bellefontaine works from was drawn on the Monday after Robert Detweiler died, at a kitchen table on Franklin Street, by his widow Judith, her sister Ann, and Cliff Eichholtz — third-generation funeral director, sixty-four, whose grandfather buried Judith's father in 1971.

The family's chart is the accurate one.

It says, in the plain hand of a widow who has been to more funerals since her seventieth birthday than she wants to count, that these six men are the ones who will carry the man she has been married to since June of 1985. Not the seventy in the pews. Not the two hundred at the luncheon. Not the four hundred and forty on the Christmas-card list she has kept in the top drawer of the roll-top desk in the sunroom since 1987.

These six.

The organization that wants to know who mattered to Robert Detweiler needs only to read A-4 of the Bellefontaine Examiner on the Thursday before the Saturday funeral. It is on the porches by four. It costs a dollar-fifty. It is not paywalled.

Nobody at the diocesan foundation has bought a copy since 2004.

What Rōmy is doing about it

Rōmy is not going to drive up to Bellefontaine on Saturday morning. It is not going to sit three rows from the back at St. Patrick's, and it is not going to sign the guest book on the way out.

What Rōmy does is smaller than that.

Rōmy reads the small papers.

It reads the Bellefontaine Examiner, and the Marysville Journal-Tribune, and the West Liberty Herald, and the Kenton Times, and the Sidney Daily News. It reads the obituary page. It reads the italicized line under Pallbearers in six-point Times.

On the Monday morning after Cliff Eichholtz walked Robert Detweiler up the aisle of St. Patrick's for the last time, Rōmy places a small quiet note at the top of the associate director of stewardship's list:

Robert J. Detweiler (Bellefontaine, St. Patrick's, giving since 1994) was buried Saturday morning. Pallbearers per the Bellefontaine Examiner, Thursday page A-4: (1) Gary Detweiler — brother, Marysville. (2) Peter Cameron — Cleveland, roommate at Ohio Wesleyan '83, currently CFO of a specialty chemicals firm, on the board of the Cleveland Museum of Art since 2019. (3) Rev. Douglas Whitmer — West Liberty, retired First Presbyterian, baptized both Detweiler daughters. (4) James Detweiler — son, equity research, Columbus; his firm's founding partner chairs a family donor-advised fund at the Columbus Foundation. (5) Michael Detweiler — son, engaged to Rachel Bishop (Wilmington, OH); Bishop family attorney in Cleveland is finalizing a Bishop trust that names a Catholic education foundation. (6) Thomas Griffin — Griffin & Sons Hardware, Bellefontaine. Suggested: a plain cream card, this week, to Judith Detweiler at the Franklin Street address — signed by name, no ask. A second card, separately, to Peter Cameron in Cleveland, thanking him for driving five hours to carry his roommate of forty-three years. Send nothing to the sons until the estate is settled. Would you like drafts, in your own voice?

The cards go out on Tuesday.

Judith reads hers on Thursday, on the sunroom couch, and cries the small private tears of a widow whose husband's foundation remembered his name — not just his gift record — in the second week after he was buried.

Peter Cameron reads his in Cleveland on Friday and, in the way of men who were once nineteen and shared a corner double on the third floor of Elliott Hall in the fall of 1979, forwards it — with three sentences of his own — to the Detweiler family group text.

The window that would have closed by January stayed open.

A small assignment, with love ♡

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

Pull the list of donors who died in the last ninety days. If your CRM does not flag deceased donors, ask the woman who processes returned mail — the one whose desk is next to the shredder — for the last thirty envelopes that came back marked deceased. She has them in a manila folder. She has been waiting for someone to ask.

Take the top three. Find the obituary in the small paper of the small town each of them lived in — the Examiner, the Journal-Tribune, the Herald, whatever is on the porches on the Thursday before the funeral.

Turn to the italicized line at the bottom of the obituary. Read the six names under Pallbearers.

Write two names down. The ones outside the immediate family. The friend from college. The retired pastor. The hardware-store owner on the corner.

Do not put a case for support on the card.

Do not put a QR code on the card.

Take a plain cream Crane's from the top drawer of the credenza, and, in blue ink, in your own hand, write three sentences to each of them. Say the deceased's name once. Say the small specific thing you know — the shared roommate, the baptism, the ten-penny nails. Say, in the plain language of a person who was paying attention, that you saw them named as pallbearer.

Walk the two cards, on your lunch break, to the post office on your corner.

The paper is on the porches on Thursday.

The service is at eleven on Saturday.

The pallbearer list is a sentence in six-point Times.

Read it.

The family put those six names in the paper because it was the truest sentence they could publish about the man they loved.

They were waiting for you to notice. ♡