The woman is one of about 50 residents of the facility owned and operated by Bobby Jean Hopkins. The state pays Hopkins $572 to $1,025 per month for each resident housed in the the Salubrium, as the home is called. Hopkins said she took the name from the word salubrius, meaning healthful.

Hopkins said that several years ago, after a resident of the Salubrium died and was cremated by the county, some of the other residents were upset and expressed interest in buying insurance policies so that they would have funerals and burials and not be cremated when they died.

When Thomas Rain, 62, died of chronic bronchitis at the Salubrium last January, Hopkins sent the body to the Angelus Funeral Home and started to make funeral arrangements when she learned from the mortuary that Rain's death benefits from his insurance policy would have to be handled through the county public administrator because there were no relatives and the policy listed Rain's estate as beneficiary rather than an individual.