Ahhhhhhhhh

A lot’s going on in my life lately so this isn’t going to be anything close to a full rundown — sorry about that. I’ll try to do better next time, but here I’m cutting to the chase: Cody (my dead mother’s second husband’s daughter-by-his-second-marriage’s husband) died. And what does that make us? Brothers. Well, brothers-in-law, at the least. I accidentally agreed to pay for the funeral. The total is just shy of $10,000 (US Dollars), I paid $4,000, and the $6,000 is due in five weeks.

Before meeting with everyone to make arrangements for the funeral, I tried to say to my step-father, conscious that he and I had inherited comfortably from my lately deceased mother and that Allie and her husband’s family are of a class decidely less à l’aise, that we should not allow money to be an explicit concern: the family was demure about having the service on a Saturday because of the extra cost of overtime work from the funeral home staff, but felt that having it on the weekend would mean people could make it since they would be off work. I couldn’t let $500 make the difference there, and I felt comfortable contributing something like that to the pot.

(The only other big change was the choice of casket for the viewing, another $450 dollars or so that wasn’t worth not doing, if that’s what they wanted. Cut the kid a break: the widow’s 27 years old.)

After this, my step-father said, in front of everyone who had arrived for the consultation, “Preston has offered to pay for the funeral.” Allie’s eyelids were swollen and raw; under Cody’s father’s eyes the skin looked blistered from pooling tears. Cody’s mother couldn’t make it. I did it for them; my step-father and his ex-wife (Allie’s mother) could have paid for it.

Now I know how my mother felt.