I wrote a diary for the group Practical Survival and Sustainable Living today on a few important Death Tips for helping your loved ones survive and cope with your death.
This is part of the story that led to that diary.
My mother and I were estranged - her choice - for more than 25 years. One day, my younger sister calls to tell me Mother is in the hospital, in the ICU, so I drive down to see what's going on and see what I can do to help. Just because my Mother refused to talk to me didn't mean she wasn't still my Mother.
Turns out she'd had a stomach flu and hadn't called anyone for help. And because she ran off almost everyone in the family and most of her friends, changing her phone number every time she argued with someone, no one called her. It was chance that she was found, dehydrated and weak but recovering. She probably would have recovered on her own, she's that stubborn, but they took her to the hospital anyway.
The hospital eventually killed her, with MRSAs coming from bed sores she developed after she was in the hospital for 4 days.
During the time she was in the hospital, all we did at her house was check her mail and make sure the house was safe, mowed her lawn, that sort of thing.
But when she died of an MRSA contracted in the hospital, we had to do more.
Mother hadn't left any funeral arrangements behind. No pre-paid plot. No word on if she wanted to be cremated or buried or what. Our father was killed on active duty and we could claim a place for both him and her both in the military cemetery in town, so we started the paperwork to do just that. Our father was buried who knows where by his relatives - whom Mother angered when we were quite young and whom we never met, but the military was OK with just putting up a plaque with his service info on it and adding her to it and putting her ashes in the crypt. They actually gave her very nice military funeral after she was approved for burial there.
Since she hadn't specified any funerary arrangements, we found a funeral home and had her cremated. My sister and I are the only one who know that the urn at her memorial service was empty because the hospital lost her body. They found it and she was cremated before the military approved her placement in the crypts there, so her ashes were indeed placed in the crypt behind the plaque.
Mother left behind a 15 year old Will, one she'd gotten off the internet from a friend of a friend who was a paralegal. The judge didn't like the Will at all - she'd downloaded and used a Will from Dallas County and she lived in Tarrant County so the form of the Will was wrong. Worse, she named my sister the Executor of the Will, not the Executrix. So we had to go through an affidavit collection process, collecting the signatures of 90% of the people named in her Will.
Some of the people she named in her Will were themselves dead - that was fun, tracking them down and discovering that. Not. Fortunately, fewer than 10% of the people named in the Will were dead, so we didn't have to try to collect their signatures - and the judge was just enough of a stickler that I could see us trying to use mediums to contact the afterlife to get those signatures.
That's how we discovered we had a younger sibling - who also turned out to be dead but was survived by a son, also named in the Will, who was an escaped felon. How did we not know Mother had had another child? And why did we not know this? Those are questions we'll probably never really know unless we find our nephew.
He'd been named in her Will and inherited the family silver. Which, on examination, wasn't really silver, just silver plate. And wasn't even all matching. They were pieces she'd picked up at garage sales and flea markets. But - we had to hunt him down or wait the required 9 months for him to come forward and claim his inheritance. And the judge decided no one else in the family could claim their portions until we'd waited the whole 9 months.
Even worse, Mother hadn't named a Power of Attorney, so doing even the simplest things was hard - the car insurance, the bills, the bank accounts, her insurance, everything. Fortunately, she never really took to the internet and didn't have any on line accounts. She'd always get people to download things for her. Her downfall was QVC - she bought so much stuff through them. If she'd had the internet, who knows how full her house would have been!
While we waited for probate to be over and done with, we started setting Mother's house in order, cleaning it up and fixing it up and getting it ready to be sold. She was a four pack a day smoker and she'd lived in that house for more than 40 years. We had to seal the walls and repaint and get the carpets deep cleaned. That meant clearing everything out of the house.
All her furniture was like mine - roadside rejects. Old, worn, and not worth anything. Even the thrift stores didn't want her furniture. But we still had to get rid of it somehow. That was an adventure, since none of us lived in her city and none of us knew where to dispose of things like that.
We had to find out how and where to dispose of all the prescription medicines in her house, too. She'd saved every single prescription container of every drug she'd ever taken, every drug we kids had ever taken, every drug container from every kid she'd ever babysat - and most of them had a pill or two left in them. Most were antibiotics.
We found her receipts and bills and papers tucked practically everywhere. I'd given her a filing cabinet, with pendaflex folders in it all neatly labeled, 30 years ago for her to store her papers and things. It was as pristine as the day I'd given it to her. Not one receipt, bill, birth certificate or anything was in it. It was buried under a pile of yarn. Her papers were stashed inside suitcases, inside album covers, in dresser drawers, in shoe boxes, in shoes, in coat pockets, in jewelry boxes, in Tupperware containers in the freezer, as bookmarks, under canned goods in her pantry, behind a false wall she'd built in her bedroom, between mattresses, under the shelf-liners in her cabinets, rolled into gift wrap, glued to the backs of spiral bound notebooks, hidden in cookie jars and teapots, and anywhere else she could find to hide them. We found her marriage license, her parents' marriage license, her grandparents' marriage license, our father death certificate, her immigration papers, passport, and a lot of WWII papers - her traveling papers, ration cards, and so on. We found every warranty card and manual for every appliance she ever bought. We found bank statements going back to the 1930's, canceled checks, the deed to the house, car titles for every car she'd ever owned, insurance statements for things she no longer owned and on people who were dead. And we found them everywhere. Everywhere, that is, except inside the filing cabinet or the safe my sister and her husband gave her 20 years ago.
The fireproof safe contained 2 torn sheets of blank paper, a stick of chewing gum that was probably 20 years old, and a dozen or plastic pony beads.
We're still sorting and categorizing the papers we found.
Mother had 17 photo albums. Not one of them had the names of the people in the photos. None of them were dated. That's a project we haven't even gotten to, yet.
Mother was also a pack rat. She'd buy presents for people, then get mad at them and never give them the gifts. Some were still in their wrapping paper with the name of the person on them, so we made sure those who were still living got those presents. Some were wildly inappropriate - baby clothes and toys for children who were now adults, for example. The generic gifts weren't so bad -the tree ornaments and crystal bowls and such. Mother seemed to be of the opinion that if it was on sale, one wasn't enough. She'd buy 4 or 5 or 10 of them and store them away in case she needed a gift quickly.
She also did crafting: embroidery, knitting, crocheting, and sewing plush bunnies and bears and dressing them. Ostensibly, she made these for someone, then got mad at them and kept them. Some had tags on them detailing who was supposed to get them - those we gave to the right people. Sadly, some of the sweaters she knitted and caps she crocheted were too small for the recipient because they'd grown up or grown fat. All the rest of them, we cleaned and took to a shelter.
But that still left all the supplies - bins and boxes full of buttons, sequins, sewing tools, threads, fabrics, lace and trim, needles, and more. As a crafter myself, I took a lot of these things.
And more.
There was so much more.
My daughter eyed all of this in appalled awe and decided she would curb her packratitis.
My daughter was relieved when I shared with her my plans for when I died. And she promptly made her own arrangements. I'd had a discussion with my kids back when the first one turned 18 and again when one joined the military, but hadn't pushed them too hard on it. Seeing what we went through to settle up Mother's very small estate was far more graphic than I'd ever been, and was apparently far more effective.
So, I wrote a practical handbook on what to do to put your affairs in order and what to do if a loved one was dying or had died and hadn't put their affairs in order. Some of that, the most important bits, I shared in my diary over at Practical Survival and Sustainable Living.