Death in the Family

by Laura

Our father died five days ago.
Heart failure brought on by pneumonia.  He was 76 years old.

The funeral and visitation were two days ago, on Thursday.  Everybody, and I mean everybody, talked about what a good person he was.  Generous, supportive, yadda yadda yadda.  And those who also knew our mother, who passed away 14 years ago, said similar things about her.

We have two younger brothers.  Our second brother's co-workers and political friends said the same kinds of  things about him as people said about our parents.  If there had been more of brother #1's friends there, they probably would have said the same about him as well.

Of course, all of these things are true.  We don't want to give the impression that they aren't.  I keep thinking about how craptastically self-centered I am, wondering what people think about me/us.  We isolate so much that we have no idea.

Today we spent six and a half hours going through our father's account records.  We'd been helping him pay his bills, etc. since his major illnesses of mid-2010.  So we knew what we had to look for.  We have to keep paying the bills, but we're glad that brother #1, who lives four hours away, is taking care of the legal/estate stuff.

This really, really sucks.