Where've I been? (Part 2)

Okay, this was originally the rest of the previous post, but it seemed almost cheap to keep going with it after I spent so much time talking about Mom's last moments. So I cut it out and put it here.

Anyway, the rest of that day was a mess. I kept busy as long as I could. We were at the funeral home, we were talking to Janet and Gregory and Zita a lot, we went back to Brenda and Steve's for a while and I logged in to work from my laptop to try to answer a few questions and keep my mind occupied. Unfortunately this is where my memory gets a bit soft around the edges, too. What I do know is this. It was Tuesday. The funeral was Thursday. I'm pretty sure we left the Island on Saturday, we took Friday to try to accomplish the last of the business we could, and we returned to Ontario on Sunday.

I know Gregory and I started making the rounds right after that. There was, obviously, the business of the funeral home to attend to, but there was also a number of other things that needed to be done. We needed to cancel Mom's old age security cheques, we needed to cancel her health care card and her driver's license, I needed to get into the safe deposit boxes to get a look at her will, stuff like that. Gregory knew he had been named as her executor and I was the next of kin -- it's funny the things we knew then and the things we knew a few days later, as much as I dislike the random associations my mind makes much of the time, it can be somewhat embarrassing when I'm standing in the washroom and my subconscious burps up some particularly funny tidbit, I couldn't help hearing Lawrence Fishburne talking about what we know in The Matrix -- but we didn't know if there was anything in there that we would maybe need a lawyer to interpret for us. We were hoping the answer would be no, that we could just read the will and carry out everything the way she'd already told us it would go. Whatever money she had left should go to paying off her bills and covering her expenses, pretty much anything else would go to me, her jewelry would go to my sister (and Trish and I had already made a slight amendment to that when her and Mom had talked about the paintings and Mom said she wanted Trish to have the ones she'd had up in her place on Campbell; no big deal that, since we had been told by Mom that's what she wanted and it's also what I wanted, honestly I would have been happier if Trish had taken more of the paintings, we already had some and I want to share and I do feel like I've had a leg up all along since I knew Mom had been painting for years, but I think we agreed on something we can both live with).

It turns out that we couldn't cancel Mom's CPP without the executor present to sign the papers, so we had to call Gregory. Then it turns out we couldn't cancel her driver's license without him present too, so we called him again. Then it turns out we couldn't cancel it anyway without him present and a copy of the will saying he was the executor. That leads me to a mystery that still confuses me a bit. There was no will in Mom's safe deposit box. That meant we had to wait until at least Friday when we could get an appointment with Mom's lawyer.

The safe deposit box, though. That was just full of unexpected traps and treasures. She had a stash of cash in there labelled for her final expenses. A large stash. There was a mouth organ (read: harmonica) there as well that a week before I wouldn't have known at all but after having met some of the relatives I now realized was the one Greg (my Grandfather) had played at dances when he was a teenager. I guess according to the strictest interpretation of the will that should have been mine now but I was sure it would mean more to Gregory than me, so I took it from the box for him. The worst was a birthday card I had sent Mom two years ago. I'd written a note in it and she had kept it and put it in the box. As if that wasn't bad enough, she had written her own note in it for me, "Dear Hon, You'll be reading this after I'm gone...". I'm serious, that's my mom. I tried reading it right then but I couldn't get more than a few sentences in, I hope there was nothing time-critical in there because I put it back and I don't plan to read it before Christmas.

So we did what we could on Tuesday and we were at the funeral home on Wednesday from about quarter to one until almost five and again from about six-thirty until a little after nine. We slipped out for dinner at The Heritage (again, I've eaten there quite a few times now) and on the way out I was sure I heard my name. I turned around and there, sitting at one of the tables with his brothers, was George, my cousin Evelyn's husband. I wasn't even sure he was on the Island and I had pretty much concluded that he hadn't heard, that we hadn't been able to reach him in time, but it turns out that he had been planning to come by to see us during the evening sitting.

The sittings. That was something. I mean, I guess I kind of knew how many people loved Mom and were likely to come by to see us from the number of visitors she had while she was in the hospital, but it was still overwhelming. In a good way, of course, I'm just lacking another word to describe the feeling I got when at one point I looked up from the person I was talking to and literally saw a line out the door of the salon of people waiting to see Mom.

Anyway, I'd met a lot of people in the hospital, but there were a lot more people I met at the funeral home who had only known through the notices we put in the news paper or had on the radio. (Oh, for anyone not from that kind of community, we still have death announcements on the radio stations. And they have the occasional traffic report, too, which always makes me smile for some reason.) Most of those people came up to me, generally introduced themselves (most names of which I've forgotten) or reminded me who they were (like Mr. Greenan, one of my two favorite catechism teachers) and then offered their sympathies. They'd inevitably ask how she died and then offer up the logical conclusion, "was it diabetes?" My mom had been Type-2 for years now, everyone knew it, and who would have thought that she'd have died from a frighteningly rapidly progressing cancer? Most folks who had seen her recently (as in back in June and July, this was only the first of September, after all) had known she wasn't looking well but there had never been a breath of a word of cancer, so everyone I told was shocked.

Unfortunately I'm again running short of time, it's Saturday morning now and our ride to the airport is coming soon, so I guess I'll finish this up later with a part 3, though I'm not quite sure when that'll happen. It may not be until Wednesday, I think we're going to spend the next few days with Dad so my internet access will be somewhat limited. I'll be back as soon as I can, though.