Bess Truman died at Independence, Missouri, on October 18, 1982, aged ninety-seven, after declining health and heart failure. Her final weeks followed hospitalization for a bleeding ulcer in September. She returned to the family home, where she had lived for much of her life and throughout the years after Harry Truman's death in 1972. The National Park Service's account places her death in her bedroom there. Congestive heart failure was the reported immediate cause, but the public record does not provide a complete clinical chart linking every earlier condition to the end. Her final period was therefore one of increasing frailty and medical difficulty within a long-established domestic setting, rather than continued public activity as a former first lady. She had always guarded the privacy of family life, and detailed bedside conversations should not be invented to fill the gaps in the account. A private funeral followed on October 21, and she was buried beside her husband in the courtyard of the Truman Library. Those arrangements joined the public commemoration of the presidency to the private life she had maintained in Independence. The supported sequence is illness, a September hospital stay, return home and death the following month, with the exact final medical course remaining largely private.