Rubin: A funeral director’s loss

You tell Gary Deak you are sorry for his loss, because it’s true and because you don’t do this enough to be original.

“I am, too,” he says.

He helps with this sort of thing all the time. Explaining, consoling, making people feel better.

So far, he has not been able to help himself.

Deak, 62, has been a funeral director for nearly two-thirds of his life. That’s how he met Betsy, in fact; he was working in Trenton in 1979, and she came in with her sister to talk about burying their father.

“It’s different on this side of the table,” he says, and then he stops for a moment to collect himself. “It’s different when it’s your spouse, your soulmate.”

But enough about him, he says. He wants to talk about the quietly extraordinary Betsy.

If her name is familiar, it’s probably because of the monthly memorial service for the poor souls left unclaimed at Detroit hospitals and the Wayne County morgue.

Reporters have come to Perry Funeral Home in Detroit to see it a few times, and as much as she tried to deflect attention from herself, Betsy Deak is the one who took a suggestion from a stranger and turned it into a regularly scheduled interlude of kindness and prayer.

“She embraced it,” he says — the reading of names and the murmuring of blessings for the departed before they are buried in pine boxes, four to a grave.

“This isn’t about me,” she would say. “It’s about them.” And it was about them, she would explain, because once upon a time, “They were somebody’s somebody.”

Just like her.

Demise ‘a blur’

Gary Deak can remember the date Betsy was diagnosed with brain cancer: Nov. 30, 2012, eight days after she suddenly couldn’t hold a fork at Thanksgiving dinner.

He can remember the date of her surgery: Dec. 7, 2012. He can run through diagnoses and recoveries and setbacks and terms he never expected to know, like “sub-acute seizures” and “expressive aphasia.”

Then you ask what day she died, after 31 years, five months and 27 days of marriage, and he fumbles for an answer.

“All a blur, my friend,” he says. “All a blur.”

It was Nov. 29, a Sunday. The first brain tumor had been dispatched, but a second had proven more resilient.

The last six months, she couldn’t walk, which was inconvenient, and she couldn’t speak, which frustrated her terribly.

Betsy, 65, held multiple degrees from Western Michigan. She had been a teacher and a newspaper editor.

She was a licensed builder and a Boy Scout leader. For the annual July 4 celebration at the library in Whitmore Lake, she was Mary Todd Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony, among others, always crafting her own costume.

Unimpressed with the educational opportunities in their township between Whitmore Lake and Dexter, she home-schooled their two kids. Unimpressed with the standard plastic toys, she started a company that made wooden ones.

She was a seamstress and a chef. She played piano and guitar. She and Gary personally renovated their 1848 farmhouse, stripping it to the skeleton.

“She didn’t walk up the steps,” Gary says. “She ran.”

Then she stopped.

Offering good advice

Quinn Klinefelter, a reporter at WDET-FM (101.9), met her while he was reporting a story at Perry Funeral Home, one of three in which Gary Deak holds an interest.

It was not long after the brain operation. Klinefelter, widowed two years prior, had begun dating.

“She started offering advice,” he says, and when he called afterward with a few follow-up questions, she counseled him again.

He told her he was particularly grateful for her time, given what she was going through.

“I’d rather try to help somebody,” she said, “than plan my funeral.”

Ultimately, she did some of that, too.

Days after the service, Gary Deak is at work. Blue pinstriped shirt, yellow tie, white Kleenex in a box within arm’s reach.

“What am I going to do at home?” he asks. “Look at the four walls?”

Every board and brick within those walls, he says, had been touched by one or both of them.

Someday, you tell him, that will be a comfort.

He’s probably said the same thing himself a few times. He nods. Maybe someday.

nrubin@detroitnews.com

@nealrubin_dn