proteanme

I realized today I’ve been spending all the executive functioning in my brain everyday for the last 10 days trying to figure out all the details of my dad’s death, plus the one’s we need to know about his life in order to deal with his death. And that was not working for me. At all. Not only to I have to get sleep but I’ve got to narrow down the scope of decisions we need to make. And soon.

Plus, there’s this boat load of people kinda on the periphery and some who are “knocking at the door” – like the Catholic priests, a pushy funeral director, strangers on the phone at the VA and the bank and the Social Security Administration, the adult children of my dad’s last marriage whom none of us have ever met, an old lady friend of my dad’s who claims my dad was storing stuff for her in his house (including her deceased husband’s ashes), and some other folks who are going unnamed for right now because it would probably just hurt my family’s feelings to even mention them here.

No one tells you that it’s like this. That it’s the brutal task of making a bunch of decisions and you’re not even sure who you are making them for. You get to a point where you just to get it over with. You don’t want to make another fucking decision or phone call, but you have to. No one else is gonna do it. No one else can.  And the one dude that could have shed the most helpful light on the subject is dead. And he was pretty tight lipped on the matter beforehand. So now it’s our job. We have to bury my dad. And we’d like to do it some grace and dignity, which is hard to conjure up when trying decipher the pricing list from a funeral home that looks about as easy read to as papers from a mortgage broker. The shape of these days.

Just to top it off. Just because day ten needed to be the noisier than the preceding nine, my mom wrecked her car today. And tonight, after a really nice visit with RU over here at my house, when she left she found the wall of her rear tire had blown out and of course she needs to drive tomorrow. Luckily, I don’t. I can bus it. But dang, man. That shit ain’t fair.