Missed appointment

I am not sure which is worse: that the clinic sent me a text message--a text message!--or that they were calling about a missed appointment.

"I am returning a call. The caller did not leave a name. I did not make any appointments there, did not call there for him"
"Is the child in foster care?"
"The child was." The child. I don't know. Those words just caught me off guard. And so I repeated them.
"Was, or is?"
"The child (repeating the phrase again) was...is...(no, don't say what he is, can't say it)...has....unfortunately passed on."
"Oh. We didn't know. What is his or her name?" Wow. You really don't know anything about him at all, huh? So I give her the name. She puts me on hold. Someone comes to the line again, whether the same woman or a different woman I am neither sure nor concerned.

She asks his name again. (His legal name. Not his family name. He was not adopted yet, and so we still had to use the legal name. This is how he identified them: legal name, family name.) I say it again, the words thick and heavy in my mouth, the sour sting not tasted until the aftertaste hit later.

She pauses. It is clear to me now that she is not asking because she does not know, but because she is double-checking that she is in the correct file before making this new, this last notation.

"I am sorry," she begins. Her words as heavy, as heavily laden sounding to me as saying his name had felt. "He was in the computer for an appointment on July 2. It came up as a missed appointment. We were calling because of the missed appointment. We didn't know. I am sorry..."

I ask her to please make sure the clinic does not call, or text--text!--me again. She agrees. And again she apologizes, she didn't know.

I feel badly for her, I really do. But mostly I just feel bad because she has made me have to explain that which I try repeatedly to forget, to not believe, to will to be different that which I know I need to process, to cope with, to accept.