Queercents

There are laws that protect people from salespeople who work at funeral homes and cemeteries. Lawmakers recognized that during a time of grief, people are unusually susceptible to manipulations that result in overspending that can leave the deceased’s loved ones in debt.

When it comes to step-family or family members, however, there is no protection. In my case, it was my mother’s 2nd husband (let’s call him Rick for now…I’ll explain later) who manipulated my grief, tricked me into obligating myself, and then refused to pay the bill.

In short, I’m in debt close to $7,500. My mother had shown me her Will that clearly stated he would pay for funeral expenses. When we were discussing her funeral arrangements he approved every detail and then asked me to help him “set things up.”

What I am about to share is extremely personal and painful. I don’t know that I’ll ever get over it and I don’t even know if I’ll ever get used to it. Perhaps my view of events is tinged with my own complicated grief.

Usually, I write with a reader in mind. I aim for a balanced approach. Here, however, I invite you into my world and into my pain for selfish reasons. I’m searching for a way to feel better. If in the end, you can benefit from my experience and avoid this kind of horror, then the universe is working the way I believe it should.

Life is difficult enough for those in the GLBT community. On top of the typical dysfunctions there is the extra-added burden of “what people think” about “that lifestyle choice.” It’s always hanging there, it seems, when straight people are talking about anything: “the only reason she’s squawking about paying for funeral costs is because…well…you know, it’s because she’s one of those people.”

My mom came to see me on 9/11. The 9/11. We’d had a tumultuous mother/daughter relationship from around 1975 until that year. She was an assertive intellect. If you took anything personally, you were road kill on any topic. For me, I made it my mission to stand up to her when I thought I had a point. I would lose sometimes. Sometimes, however, I would win and she would grin at me with a twinkle in her eye. In that silent energy the message was clear to me. She was proud of me. She was happy that I could fight with her and not take it personally.

As we sat drinking coffee that day, I became emotional and began to tear up. She reached across the table and patted my hand and said it would be all right. At that moment, a man walked past our table and looked at our publicly displayed, affectionate hands on the table and manufactured a clear smirk that he carried away judgmentally.

“Ha.” She laughed. “This world has become so cynical…he thinks he just walked by two lesbians.”

“Ha.” I responded. “and just like most people, he’d only be half right.”

Ha.

I earned my relationship with my mother. It became evident that others who drifted through or in her life simply took what was there and never engaged with her. They inherited their relationship with her. It seems to me that too many people inherit their opinions of people rather than take the time or make the effort to earn it.

It was their loss since some of the most brilliant brilliance I’ve ever witnessed came from a place inside of my mother where her heart and her intelligence worked in tandem to produce spiritual wisdom.

I saw my mother at Christmas in 2006. I returned to my hometown and resumed a pattern of talking with my mother once or twice a week. She sounded weak but she’d long ago started sounding winded on the phone. An operation in 1995 resulted in her diaphragm being damaged.

In March of 2007, I answered the phone to my panicked sister’s voice. Mom was falling down, unable to get herself back up, not eating (at least not enough to keep a bird alive), sleeping all the time, awake less than an hour a day, and disoriented.

“How long has this been going on?” I asked.

Two and ½ months.

My heart flipped.

With my mother’s condition, it was obvious and had been clearly defined by her doctor that she was on a tight and fragile wire. I wondered why she hadn’t gone to the doctor? I wondered why no one had called the doctor? I wondered why no one had called my mother’s brother or her cousin?

By the time my mother was admitted to the hospital, she was in renal failure. It had started with a simple bladder infection that she just couldn’t feel. She was taking strong painkillers. But the symptoms described by my sister were severe and evident in the early part of the year.

Why, I wondered, was this okay? Why was it okay that Rick watched her get sicker and sicker over all those weeks and never called anyone? How many years, I wondered, had the delay of getting to the doctor taken off of her life?

My sister, nearly 50 years old, is diagnosed mentally ill. She lived in the home but had no power to make things happen. She would be overruled with bully tactics.

Seven days after my mother was buried Rick packed up the contents of their home as if in a twisted scene from “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” and left the state. His daughter, who claimed to have been a friend of my mother, helped him every step of the way. To date, she has refused to send me the guest book for my own mother’s memorial service.

I recognize the behaviors. It’s their shame, embarrassment, and guilt.

The entire ordeal put me in the hole with new debt of $7,500; earned me my first true broken heart, and landed me on the tile floor in the bathroom at the Panera Bread Company two days after my mother left.

I remember lying there wondering how my mother must have felt. Unable to speak. I was unable to speak. Feeling so awful. I felt so awful. Feeling so alone. I felt so alone.

And then, I felt a cool sensation on my forearm.

“Are you alright? Are you here with someone?”

It was a human hand. A soft, cool, caring human hand.

I had touched my mother’s arm and her hands. I had washed her hair. I had changed her gown and her clothes. I had held her up on her short, magnificent trips from the bed to the bathroom and back again.

“Is someone out in the restaurant that I can call?”

And the voice. The voice was filled with the energy of someone paying attention to me, filling my ears, my mind, and my essence with a sense of simply being there…trying to help bear whatever it was I was having to bear.

I had sat and read to my mother. I had talked to her while others talked about her. I had insisted people let her make the effort to make her own decisions even if the effort was great for her…even if it meant that she would be mad at me for making her try…giving her what she gave me.

A voice. Dignity. Attention. Time to get my words out.

The woman who’d found me on the floor of that bathroom had been a nurse for 28 years. She must have been 80 years old. But she found her way down to the ground, on to her hands and knees, reaching under the locked stall door to touch me…to comfort me.

I lost in small claims on a technicality. Rick brought a lawyer with him…to small claims court. A lawyer…to small claims court. Hmmm.

Coward.

I had to endure his slimy lawyer lecturing me on the law as if I were an incompetent attorney rather than a grieving daughter. The only satisfaction I got was that Rick had to travel back to my state at his own expense, twice. His travel and the cost of his stay were more than the cost of my mother’s marker. What does that say about him? That he would spend over $1500 to travel to small claims rather than pay anything toward his wife’s marker…with his wife’s money?

I told the Judge that I had already won since Rick had to appear in court twice at his own expense and because I wanted it on the record that someone fought for my mom…someone stood up. The Judge responded that the court was a court of law not a court of right. I could tell she was disgusted with Rick but she couldn’t do anything.

My mother trusted Rick to distribute her estate to benefit her mentally ill child as well as to behave decently with me about precious mementos. But she never stated it specifically in her Will nor did she make specific arrangements. She trusted her husband.

So many say that GLBT people are attacking marriage. Ironic when you consider how many straight people devalue it on a regular basis. My mother…and all she made possible for others…and who she was…and all she gave life to…and everything she created…was reduced to property rights.

In the end, Rick spent about $1600 on my mother’s funeral expenses but only because I made sure there were plenty of witnesses in addition to the family members he so detests.

I will never be sorry for being the one who stepped over all of the bombs, stepped up to do the right thing, and stepped into Rick to hold him accountable.

I’ve been through all the legal “remedies” I can stomach to try and get Rick to do the right thing. At the end of the day, he is still the greedy, deceitful, manipulative old toad that he always was and I’m still in debt.

There is a private name for my mother’s 2nd husband. When said aloud it sounds like the man’s name “Rick.”

The p is silent.

That felt good! Perhaps I need to write a book about the whole rotten mess.

How can you bring up the topic of burial wishes and costs? I wish I knew what to tell you. Find an article about it and show it to your loved one. Get them talking about it if at all possible.

I tried to do that with my mother. She gave me a copy of her Will. I’m sure she thought that was all there was too it.

Except that she told me Rick was supposed to set up a small trust fund for my older sister. I never dreamed that Rick would pack up their house within one week of her burial and leaving the state without so much as a photograph for my scrapbook.

What I wish I’d done was insist that mom put a funeral expense life insurance policy in place. Heck, I would have paid the premiums!

At a time when I should be learning how to live without my mother in my life, I’m grappling with anger. I can’t get closure. I haven’t even begun to grieve.

When someone you love passes away where will you be? Close to the legally responsible individual or hovering with the cowards in the corner? If you choose to hover with the cowards then you’ll be okay financially since you won’t be helping anyone to “set things up.” The question is can you sleep at night after hovering with the cowards in the corner?

I don’t think it will ever be possible for me to ever look at any of my siblings, my Uncle, my father (the man to whom she was married for 26 years and to whom she gave five children) again. I’m disgusted with all of them for being so very indecent, so much trash, so uncaring, and so inhumane!

If you step up to offer your support and strength, what can you do to protect yourself from becoming financially responsible? If you don’t sign the contract with the funeral home, there might not be a funeral or there’ll be confusion that adds to the grief of the person you are trying to help. If you don’t sign the contract with the cemetery for a headstone, they won’t open the grave and everyone will be there with no way to bury the person you love!

It’s awfully unfair being a responsible grown up. The problem is that it’s so hard to find other people to be grown up with.

Get this conversation started. Think about the people in your life who are nearing the end of their lives. Learn about cremation, viewings, burial, headstones, etc. Find out about how other people in your family have settled their burial affairs.

For those of you who have a clear-cut plan…congratulations. Death, dying, betrayal, protecting yourself, and your mother’s 2nd husband being a Rick aren’t exactly easy conversations to have with the loved one you want to protect. So for those of you who do not have a plan or clear understanding of one, how are you going to avoid getting buried in debt?

Would I do it again? Would I go into debt, put up with the indifference and cruelty of my relatives, endure the horrors created by Rick just so I can make sure my sister made it to safety and my mother’s remains were buried with her family?

“D@!#” straight. Money, in cases like this, can define us. For me, there are just some things that don’t fit into my spreadsheet or a budget. Preserving my mother’s dignity and memory was paramount to me and I don’t regret it. The kind of debt in which I am buried I can pay back over a short amount of time.

The kind of debt owed by Rick, his daughter, and my relatives is something that they will forever have to pay knowing it will never bring them even. He, nor his daughter, nor the uncaring fools who might claim to be my family will ever be able to make it right. And it will forever define them all as selfish, greedy, and cruel.

Something my mother tried to warn them all about for decades.

Being the daughter of my mother was like being the daughter of a movie star for me…like Joan Crawford or Judy Garland. Once, one of the hundreds of maroons my mother helped asked me what it was like to grow up in my mother’s shadow. I was very young and didn’t know how to respond. Later, the perfect response occurred to me.

I didn’t grow up in my mother’s shadow.

I grew up in her light.

I ended my eulogy for my mother with Maya Angelou’s poem, I Shall Not Be Moved. The last stanza, so powerful and resonating so strongly with me, I had to speak it twice:

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.
I miss you, mom.