2001-05-17 - 11:08 p.m.

Turning Off The Lights

Today was pretty much a continuation of yesterday - Harry and I taking care of various things to do with my father.

I don't know how many of you out there reading this have been in the situation I am in now, namely being in charge after someone else dies. Death seems likes the end, but in a lot of ways it's just the beginning of a bunch of red tape. The fact is that even though a person is dead, he or she is still alive to the government, and in dozens or even hundreds of computers all over the place. It's a big, big job after someone dies to hunt down all these little virtual bureaucratic zombies and wipe them out.

It really sucks. It's not enough that you have to endure someone dying, but you have the melancholy duty of erasing their memory from the earth and disposing of their possessions. Bills have to be paid, mail has to be rerouted, various utilities have to be turned off.

I have to admit that it was a lot harder doing this when Mom died. For starters, I was new at it, and there was the additional problem of having to take care of Dad. Shortly after she died it became pretty plain that he could barely take care of himself. But that is a tale for another day.

This is going to sound cold, but I can't stress this enough - everyone over the age of 30 should talk to their parents about estate planning. Let me tell you, if I hadn't been in charge of Dad's finances for the last four years, purposely simplifying and contracting them, I would be cleaning up a horrible mess now. Do you know what's in your parents' will? Do you know what kind of a funeral they want? These are things that really should be discussed. Don't be like my parents who kept us in the dark until it was too late.

Dad never stated a preference about what kind of funeral arrangements he wanted, but in the last few years I don't think he COULD have stated any preference.

Today Harry and I talked to the people from the funeral home and we made the arrangements for Dad's burial. We're having him cremated, and giving him a simple burial at the same cemetery where Mom is buried. We're not having a funeral, because I don't think I could bear the hypocrisy of it. He was a mental wreck years before Mom died, and yet everyone pretended that everything was fine. I would like to talk with some people Dad knew to find out what he was like before he became senile, but I'm not sure how to do that. There is so much of his life that we were all closed off from. Dad was really a cipher before he lost his marbles - we hardly saw him at all when I was growing up. Maybe that's why all I can remember him as now is the senile foof he became at the end.

For instance, today Harry and I emptied out Dad's old room at Hotel Happy. I ran across all these photographs of Dad hanging out at the Golf Club. Even though Dad didn't play golf, that place was like a second home to him - he could always be found lingering around the bar there. But I looked at Dad surrounded by all these smiling faces and wondered - who the fuck ARE these people? I didn't recognize any of them.

I just couldn't bear to be part of the sort of horseshit I've seen at some other funerals, and I wouldn't want to submit all the people that Dad knew to the sort of radical truth-telling I would prefer.

When Dad moved into Hotel Happy I managed to pare his possessions down to the essentials - clothing, some items of furniture, toiletries, etc. I asked Dad what he wanted to take with him, and he just indicated a couple of boxes of junk that were in his bedroom at home. I brought them along with him, but I don't think he ever looked in them for as long as he was at Hotel Happy.

Still, there were plenty of memories in the stuff that was still there. All of it told a story.

A couple years ago I remember Dad nagging me and nagging me to get him some old scrapbooks that were stored up in my attic. Apparently they had been his grandmother's, put together around the turn of the last century. I found them in the original bag I had brought them in. After all his nagging, apparently he never even looked at them. This was typical for him - he would get obsessed with something, then once he got it, he would forget about it.

One obsession he never forgot about though was money. In the drawer next to his bed we found hundreds of receipts from his bank. When he was mobile, he'd go there every day to check his balance and they'd print him out a little receipt. This used to infuriate me, because he'd been so careless about his money when he was managing it himself, now he was constantly bothering me and everyone else with questions about it. We also found a pad where he would write down his balance every day after calling the bank for information. Sometimes he'd do this two or three times a day. Toward the end the bank was getting a little fed up with this and they started charging him for the calls.

Of course the bank has an automated teller number where you can find out your balance anytime day or night, all you have to do is know how to work a touch-tone phone and know what the PIN number is. However something like that was far, far beyond Dad's capacities. He couldn't even operate a TV remote.

Speaking of money, In the last year and a half or so I made sure that Dad had no cash on him. Why? Two reasons. First, as far as I was concerned the equation was (Money + Dad = Trouble). The only thing he could do with cash was buy candy bars and taxi rides to God knows where. Also, and this is rather disturbing, Hotel Happy had a bad pilferage problem. Before I stopped giving him cash, money was constantly going missing. Of course he was incredibly inattentive, mainly deaf and very careless. If I wanted to I could probably have slipped his wallet out of his pocket while he was dozing in a chair, take the money out and put the wallet back without waking him up. Of course another problem was that he never locked the door to his room, so it would have been easy to walk in after he went to bed and take the money out of his wallet. He snored so loudly that you could have come in with a brass band blaring and he wouldn't have woken up.

Since I didn't feel like funding the thieves at Hotel Happy, whether they were employees or other residents, I just didn't give Dad any more money to carry around. I made arrangements with the various services, like the hair salon and the dry cleaners, to bill me themselves. Dad complained about not having any money and asked for it frequently, but when I tried to pin him down on what he wanted it for, he never could tell me.

Ah, the fun of taking care of an elderly child.

The reason why I brought all of this up is that in the top drawer of his bedside table we found an envelope with $35 in it - a twenty and three fives. He had money all along and probably never knew it! I bet what happened is he took the money out of his wallet to foil thieves and then forgot he did it. A little bit of irony.

In his bureau I found something that utterly stupefied me. One of the things that my aunt, my mother's sister, had been looking for was her father's watch, a gold Patek Phillippe wristwatch. I think she assumed that I sold it when I cleaned up my mother's estate, but I don't remember seeing it and it wasn't on any of the appraisal lists. Now I know why - my father had it all along. I think I'll send it to my aunt, just to prove that I'm not a total Philistine.

Like I said, there wasn't much left, but just going through what was there took several hours and was utterly exhausting, maybe because it was so depressing. It is something of a shock to keep running across little items that you remember from your childhood and finding them all brittle and yellow with age.

And here's proof positive that the man was a pack rat who saved everything.

We found a little manila envelope in the top drawer and when we dumped it out it was full of children's teeth. So THAT'S where the Tooth Fairy stashed her haul!

I can't believe he saved that. Harry and I were utterly grossed out.

It's all just part of turning off the lights.