Welp, just this minute I’m sitting here waiting for a couple of lawyers to show up.
To be more specific; the discussion will concern the mortuary in Sun City where my parents were laid to rest…without my advice, without my specific knowledge.
Not to sound altogether too goddamn embittered, I have to allow that my parents had made arrangements for themselves years before my mother died. And she died years before my father’s unhappy demise. But…
Yeah. But….
Backstory: My mother dies, having smoked herself into eternity. She and my father are living in Sun City by then, and had been there for some time. Among the many wise-old-age things they did while they were dwelling there: they arranged to be cremated and then stored in the local mortuary.
Except…. I don’t know that they both did so that at the time. My mother was stashed in the place. But then my father went off and married the Dragon Lady, about whom (I s’ppose) the less said the better.
When my father died, he was reduced to ashes, dumped into an urn, and set on a shelf next to my mother, as per his wishes. Presumably.
But then…
Oh, yes: but then…. when the Dragon Lady died, her relatives arranged to have her cremated and stashed in the same mortuary, on the same shelf with my father and my mother.
It would be hard to describe — certainly not in polite terms — how much I reviled the Dragon Lady. She surely ranked among the meanest human beings you could hope not to meet. She reveled in her cruelty.
My father, after she had thoroughly alienated me from him, came to detest her. He was afraid to divorce her, because — as he put it — “she’ll get all my money!”
This was the great terror of his life: someone getting all his money.
Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to accrue enough to retire on. Given that he didn’t even have a high-school diploma, this was quite a challenge and quite an accomplishment.
I wish I’d been savvy enough to have said to him, “Daddy! Your daughter is married to one of the most powerful lawyers in the Southwest. That woman is NOT gonna get all your money.”
But I didn’t have the intellectual wherewithal to do that. Plus interfering in his affairs was not my style. So…stupidly, I let this just float along, as it would.
The relatives had not bothered to tell me when dear Dragon Lady died, nor indeed did they condescend to tell me that they had arranged to have her interred next to him and my mother in the Sun City mausoleum. In fact, it was just recently that I found this out.
*****
Lawyers in, discussion had, lawyers out the door.
It’s going to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to pull this off. My will is going to have to be rewritten. Extracting my parents “cremains” from their prison in Sun City will cost a bundle. And buying space in the church’s graveyard will cost even more.
Maybe it’s not worth the headaches and the dollars. I dunno.
I must say…this makes me mad.
I am angry about it. What excuse did those people have to sneak around and deposit the Dragon Lady next to my father: the Dragon lady who made my father’s last years even more miserable than they needed to be?
Today’s discussion with the lawyers (speaking of “get all my money!”) will set me back $400. They estimate the entire maneuver will run about $4,000.
****
And…the more I think about this, the more I think it’s probably not worth doing. Who cares where their remains are stashed? They’re not alive to know about it. All their other relatives are dead: I’m the only immediate relative who survives either one of them.
And why do I care where their ashes are tucked away? Dead is dead is dead. A few ounces of whatever remains of them won’t bring them back, won’t make them any less dead. They’re not here to appreciate (or not appreciate) taking up residence in the green and quiet church close.
Huh.
Maybe I should just save my money, donate it to the church when the time comes, and let them arrange to celebrate whatever has passed for my life.
