Dropping the ball, over everything

So yesterday was a frustrating day.  I have been patiently waiting for my mom’s remains to be cremated for several days.  When we first made the arrangements last Thursday we were originally told that Monday would be the likely day it would happen.  Well it didn’t occur until yesterday because of  delays first in the death certificate being signed by the cardiologist and then supposedly because the medical examiners were dragging their feet on giving the go ahead for the cremation.

Well in addition to the cremation, the funeral home was providing me with the death certificates that will be needed for various things related to my mom’s estate.  The plan was I would pick up my moms remains and the death certificates at the same time.  Well now it was the health department that was dragging it’s feet in producing the certificates.  When I picked up mom’s remains they said the certs were not available when their courier stopped by earlier however they should be ready now.  The funeral home director said he left a long detailed message with the birth and death records office telling them I would be stopping in to get the certificate since their building is in the same government complex where I work, ok fine.

So I head to the office where they produce the death certs and come into an area that is empty besides the Haitian woman sitting behind a window.  She was in the middle of eating her lunch. I told her I was there to pick up a death certificate.  She asked me for what year, puzzled, I said “Last week” She points to the wall behind me and tells me I need to fill out a form, as she went to pick her food back up.

I told her that I was actually sent here by the funeral home to pick up the death certificates for my mom. This began a few minute exchange where I repeatedly caught myself on the edge of blowing up in the face of this woman.  The woman told me that she knows nothing about me picking up forms, that maybe the funeral home talked to the other clerk who is out on lunch but  she repeated “noone told me nothing” in her thick Haitian accent.

She even got up and saw that the death certs were indeed completed and sitting on top of a file cabinet but her directive to me was to call the funeral home back because she can’t give them to me otherwise.  If I didn’t really want to get the certificates in my hand, this was the point I would have started to angrily chastise her for being insensitive to the situation and for being more interested in stuffing her face then sorting out the confusion.  However I instead took one more deep breath, and told the woman I did not have my phone on me, and asked if she could call the funeral home to verify I was telling the truth.

It was obvious that the woman was not very interested in doing anything that kept her away from her meal a second longer but she found the number and made the call.  Of course the call confirmed that what I told her was indeed true.  She finally handed the papers over to me after seeing my drivers license.  I suppose once I had the papers in hand I would have been able to lash out at the clerk as I wanted to during the heat of the exchange.  I declined however, not seeing any tangible benefit from doing so.  My energy would have been wasted since I don’t think she was a deep enough thinker to even comprehend what was wrong with how she handled the situation.

So once I had the certs I made copies and distributed one of them to my lawyer working on my mom’s estate.  Shortly afterward he sent me a draft of the petition that would be filed with the clerk.  I immediately flagged that he had my mom listed as living in Collier instead of Lee county.  I replied back to him about the error.   He said he listed Collier because the death certificate had a Naples address.  I quickly pulled out the cert and looked at it.  The street address was correct but for the city it did indeed have Naples instead of Bonita Springs.  You have to be kidding me.

So I called the funeral home back, unsure if the error was from the health records department or from them.  It was the latter.  The guy I talked to looked at the original paperwork we signed off on and it did indeed say Bonita Springs, somewhere along the chain it was mistakenly entered as Naples.  The guy told me that for most situations, the city error will not matter when it comes to using the cert to confirm my mom’s death to whomever needs it however obviously they owed me a 100% correct certificate that he assured me they would expedite. Ok fine.

So when I picked up my mom’s remains during the afternoon it was a sad moment.  I opened the cardboard box that housed the plastic container that contained the ashes.  I did not open the inner container, I simply placed my open hand upon it and kept it there for a few moments.  I immediately felt a surge of emotion as I tried to grasp that all that is left of my mom’s physical being is in this small vessel.  As I have often done in the last 10 days, I  quickly reinstalled the dam that has kept that flood of feelings under control as I backed up and drove away.

When I returned to my office with my mom’s ashes I thought it would be a little too weird to walk in there with human remains in hand.  I instead decided to leave them in the truck however for some reason I felt badly about leaving the ashes in a hot space.  I decided to leave the truck locked and running with the AC on for 90 minutes until I left.  I don’t expect that to sound sensical but not a whole lot makes sense nowadays.

So later after Cindy got home we opened up the black plastic container that contained the ashes.  When we did I got another jolt of aggravation and anger.  My siblings and I decided that mom’s remains would be spread in the ocean.  In order to facilitate that the funeral home recommended her remains be placed in a special biodegradable bag that is designed to dissolve in water.  Doing it this way prevents scenarios where human remains are blown around in the normally windy ocean conditions.  Thursday morning I reconfirmed with the funeral director that her remains would be in one of these special bags which would in turn be placed inside of a second regular plastic bag for safekeeping.  Well what I saw was just the ashes inside of a regular plastic bag.  You have to be kidding me.

Throughout this entire process I have been very patient with the delays and bad timelines we were given.  The events of yesterday, both due to simple lack of attention to detail seem pretty incredulous.  In the funeral home business I would think attention to detail would be taken for granted.  When you are dealing with grieving families the last thing they need to deal with is your fck ups, yet there I was with two of them in one day.

So I again talked to the funeral director, in a far angrier manner this time around.  When I told him of the mistake he groaned out loud as if he was the one who actually packaged the ashes and forgot to use the bio-bag.  I told him I didn’t understand how these sort of mistakes happen.  He apologized repeatedly.  So now there has to be arrangements to get ashes back to them to place them in a container as they were meant to be.  I certainly don’t want to be the one to do it.  So yea, anyway, the funeral home’s performance score overall has dipped greatly in the last 24 hours.

So last night I again transformed my great room into a high tech fantasy football drafting venue.  I forgot to do a total head count but I think we may have had 15 people in the house in addition to Cindy and myself. As always there was a ton of food and alcohol on hand.  As always I indulged in way too much of both.

The draft wound up around 11 but as always I needed to have the house more or less back to normal before heading to bed.  Thankfully with Cindy helping me this process didn’t take nearly as long as years prior.  I woke up this morning wishing I had taken Friday off.

This weekend is going to be all about getting things around the house back in order.