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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

A lonely farewell with a eulogy from a stranger

Posted: 01/25/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Dr. Thambirajah Balachandra, Manitoba's chief medical examiner, has presided over thousands of autopsies and attended hundreds of funerals. Tuesday morning he gave his first eulogy.

The deceased was a woman he'd never met.

Dr. Dorothy Bednard, 79, died of natural causes on Boxing Day at the Maples Personal Care Home. Her body was unclaimed, one of the province's approximately 75 people annually who have no one come for them. The law dictates the bodies be held for 28 days before burial. In every case, a funeral is held and a member of the medical examiner's staff attends. If the deceased has no assets, the province pays up to $5,000 for the service and burial.

Bednard left a small estate and no will.

The staff at the medical examiner's office acts as detectives to find survivors. They succeed about half the time. They had no luck with Dorothy Bednard, a private, professional woman who dedicated her life to psychiatry.

In his simple eulogy, Balachandra sketched the 79-year-old's life. She was an only child born to Polish immigrants. Bednard entered the University of Manitoba's faculty of medicine in 1957, one of six women in a class of 52.

When she graduated in 1961, she went to McGill to complete her residency in psychiatry. She came back to Winnipeg and spent her career at what was then the Selkirk Mental Hospital.

Her ex-classmates did not forget her. They searched for her as recently as last year, when the class held its 50th reunion. Eighteen people attended from the original 52. No one could locate Bednard. The staff at the Selkirk Mental Health Centre would not release any information about their former doctor.

Two members of her graduating class and the wife of a third attended her simple funeral at Thomson in the Park Tuesday morning. Dr. Gary Beazley knew her best because they were listed next to each other alphabetically in the class list.

They became "body partners," sharing a cadaver in their first year of med school. "She was a very quiet person," he said. "She could be fun to be with."

Myrna Ronald represented her husband, infectious diseases specialist Dr. Allan Ronald.

"I think it's very sad to die without family and without friends," Myrna Ronald said.

It is sad, and that was a theme repeated in Balachandra's eulogy and by funeral celebrant Glenn Knutson.

"She was not a famous person... but she was somebody's daughter," Knutson said.

He did try to learn more about Bednard. The staff at the Maples Personal Care Home, where she lived for six years, had little to tell him. No one from the residence came to the funeral. The Selkirk hospital wouldn't or couldn't co-operate with details.

In the end, Knutson had few facts and some suppositions.

She liked to stay in her room in the personal care home, he learned, and walked the hallways without engaging others. She was Catholic. She was lonely.

And so she had a lonely funeral, her eulogy given by a stranger and her service conducted not by a Catholic priest but by a caring stranger. A lovely spray of pink flowers decorated her open casket. Three people from her past paid tribute. No former patients or colleagues were present.

A very small group followed Bednard's oak casket to its grave.

That's more commemoration than some of the lonely dead are afforded. Gordon Holens, a sub-inspector with the medical examiner's office, says he has attended many funerals where he was the only witness.

Some of her former classmates have made donations to the faculty of medicine's Class of '61 Legacy Fund in Bednard's name. She'll be remembered there.

Her hopes, dreams, loves and proudest deeds? Those died with her. They're gone forever. So sad, so lonely.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 25, 2012 B1

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