December Ended Badly

My mother died.

That is one of the reasons why I haven't updated here sooner.

She died around midnight Christmas night.

So much that could have gone wrong after that managed to happen, but in other aspects it wasn't so bad. As in, from the outside it didn't look so bad.

First we were going to cremate her since we didn't have that much money. None really. So my bother who came down from his base upstate took out a small loan to cover it from the army. Just shy of three grand.

Then we found out that mom's church didn't really approve of it, so my sister insisted on burying her after the viewing, which now tacked on another three through four grand more.

As you know, my sister and I moved out to NJ, so we were leaving most of what was going on with the funeral with my other sister who was in living with mom. Since she would be close to everyone else and the church.

We thought that she could do it. It wasn't like she didn't have people there to helper. From that statement you can correctly guess that she said she didn't have help and messed a lot of it up. I'm not going to go into details here, but the sister staying with me had a lot of damage control to do along with raising the money she needed to bury mother. The people who were part of the damage control program went to her, which is why she was dealing with it. and as for raising the money, our brother already did what he could, I can't get any money from anywhere, and the burial was something she really wanted to do.

I tried to talk her back into the cremation idea since none of us had any issues with it, but it could have been part of her dealing with mom passing, but she didn't want to go against what the church would have wanted for mom's body since she, mom, was such a big part of the church.

So now she owes about 4 people money and the burial was over a week after the the viewing after having to change funeral homes because the first one was trying to charge us $120 or so a day for just holding her body. We are getting letters from head stone makers and I'm sorting through paperwork to find out who she might have owed money to, accounts she has that needs to be closed and scanning photos that she and my other sister never got around to doing along with old documents.

I have to make it over to Brooklyn at least two more times in the near future. For some reason I have to go back to the church to tell them thank you, again, for some bizarre reason, but before that I have to go and pick through my mom's clothes for something that will fit me for going to the church. I don't want to do either even if I haven't shopped for anything to wear in almost 2 years.

I don't expect to get anything. Mom was a little shorter than me and smaller than me. I don't care if she brought things that were bigger than her size.

Ok, starting to feel a little depressed now.

Later.