Time for a post that I’ve actually written myself, eh? Is it about roleplaying or VAM or geeky stuff? Nope. It’s about my father’s cremated remains.

I’ve been IM-ing and Facebook-commenting to several interested parties over the past few days about this, so I finally figured out that maybe it would be appropriate to just write a detailed post about it, since I’ve been dragging many of you into this miasma with various tweets and such.

Here’s what’s been going on: My father died in San Antonio, Texas on December 17th. (If you want a refresher on the general status of my family saga in relation to my father, here’s my post about it.)

My father apparently left some basic instructions about how to handle his remains. He asked to be cremated and wanted his ashes sent to Michigan to be dispersed at the gravesite of HIS father, who died about 15 years ago.

So, my grandmother, who lives in Michigan where I grew up, was in regular phone contact with my dad up until the end, and she has been hoping that the mortuary would send the ashes to Michigan – at our expense – so we could have a memorial in February or March and disperse the ashes. But apparently my sister faxed in a bunch of paperwork and a check to establish herself as authority over the remains and have them sent to her in suburban Dallas. Which is reasonable, I suppose. I don’t begrudge her that, she IS physically closest to where he was living and was the most recent family member to be physically in his presence during his long descent.

But according to my grandmother that’s not what Dad wanted. And although I have not actually seen the instructions to send his ashes to Michigan, I do know from MY last phone conversation with him that he was pining to go back to Michigan, his home state. Wanting his remains disperesed there makes sense.

Forward to the aftermath of Dad’s death last December. Since no one from our family was anywhere near Dad at the end, we all spent a lot of time doing phone-tagging with one another to figure out how to get things taken care of. My sister Jodi lives closest to where he was and also was the last of us to be around him in person. She faxed her authorization to the mortuary to have Dad’s remains cremated, and told my uncle, aunt, and grandmother in Michigan that she would instruct the mortuary to send the ashes to Michigan.

In terms of all the handling of the “business” of all this, I stayed out of it. To me it sounded like everyone was agreeing to the plan and that it would work out, and Grandma would get the ashes and we’d have a memorial in Michigan when the weather warmed up a bit, and then we’d be able to grieve and get closure and mend some fences and heal some wounds.

Then, about a week ago, I was talking to my aunt on the phone (a nice side effect of all this is that I’m back in touch with my aunt and grandmother on a more regular basis) and she mentioned that they hadn’t gotten the ashes yet. My aunt said that didn’t surprise her much, because my sister was fairly loyal to my ex-stepmother and thus didn’t get along with my Dad’s relatives. BUT, my sister HAD said she would send the ashes and my grandmother really was hoping that it would actually happen. And as of last week, it hadn’t.

I decided it was time for me to step up and stop passively watching all this happen. I’m my father’s eldest child (for all that counts in this 21st-century world) and I’m the only one  who is still in contact with my Dad’s relatives and not loyal to my ex-stepmother.

[Are you confused and confounded by my half-assed attempts to clarify the mess that is my family drama yet?]

Where was I? Oh, I decided to step up and try to actively find out what was going on with the ashes. I figured that meant I was going to have to call my sister. In and of itself, that is not really a scary thing. I always got along with my sister, but she is 12 years younger than me and so I was off to college before she was 6 years old, so I don’t really know her all that well. But the real issue I was having with calling her was that I happened to know where she was living – with my ex-stepmother. And I was, frankly, scared to face the possibility of someone other than my sister answering the phone.

Without going on too much of a tangent, I’ll share that my ex-stepmother is the only person I know who I really, truly despise. I mean irreconcilably and profoundly despise. Everyone involved in this mess shares responsibility and blame for how it has turned out – including me. But I also am convinced that my ex-stepmother is the person who consciously manipulated many of my family’s worst foibles into the explosive estrangment we ended up with. She worked to tear my Dad away from all of us so she could have him to herself, and then when she was all he had left, she left him for some other guy and took off. Then, she dragged out the divorce proceedings so much that when we all tried to reconcile with my Dad in the aftermath, all he would talk about was how much he hated her and how bitter he was. Then, when we essentially agreed with him about her blatant lack of human decency, Dad wound up distancing himself from us all over again because – I think – he took our hatred of his ex-wife as a slam against him for being so loyal to her for so many years.

Ah, family.

Anyhow, I suspected that my ex-stepmother now had the ashes and I was going to have to beg her to send them to us. This would be a very hard thing for me to do. Not the begging part – the talking to her in the first place part. But Icalled. And I got an answering machine. And I left a message. And I got no reply after a day. So I called again and got the machine again. Left a message. No reply. My aunt tells me she tried to call as well and got no reply. So instead of calling a third time, I decided to try another route. I called the nursing home/hospice where Dad spent his last months in an attempt to get information about which funeral home had taken care of the cremation. Eventually, after getting bounced to several people, I got info about the funeral home last Friday. Yesterday I called the funeral home. And the very nice man named Frank Puente, owner of Puente and Sons mortuary, helped me figure out that, interestingly enough, Dad’s ashes are as of right now in storage at the mortuary. He was actually a little embarrassed, though, because looking through the file he discovered that they actually have a payment and an authorization from my sister to have the ashes mailed, and for whatever reason, they had not yet been shipped.

Interestingly, the instructions in the file request that the ashes be mailed not to Michigan, but to a PO box in the town where my sister lives.

Mr. Puente informed me that if I am in fact my father’s eldest child, I can override the current instructions and have the ashes sent to Michigan, but I’ve gotta prove I’m the eldest son by faxing a notarized copy of my birth certificate. He’s going to hold the ashes until tomorrow to give me time to either get the birth certificate sent to him or to reach my sister and talk her into authorizing sending them to Michigan (as per Dad’s wishes) instead of keeping them to herself. I’m betting it’s going to be the notarized birth-cert route. But I’ve got two kids at home and 4 inches of snow and ice to drive through to get to a notary, and Leah’s in Nashville so the boys are coming with me if I leave the house. I think I’m going to at least TRY to reach my sister and convince her to cooperate – as far as I’m concerned she can keep half or even most of the ashes if she wants them, but she DID tell my Grandma that she would sent them to Michigan, so maybe she’d be willing to send at least some of them. But my sister hasn’t returned previous calls, so I’m not optimistic about reaching her today. And then there’s the spectre of reaching my ex-stepmom instead of my sister when I call.

But now I wonder if this long and convoluted journal post is just another way for me to put off what I need to do. I need to make the call. I need to keep making the call all day until somebody picks up or calls back. I need to do this for several reasons but mostly I need to do it because I need to prove to myself that I don’t have to cower in the shadow of the hateful woman who is almost certainly behind this whole ashes mess.

I’ll try to keep those of you who are interested informed of how this plays out. Wish me luck.

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