Wrapping up someone’s life is one of the strangest things I’ve ever done and no one has made it stranger than the cable company. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Cable companies are notorious for being money whores and, evidently, the chance to get a few more dollars from the dead is just too good of an opportunity to pass up.
I have learned a lot over the last weeks but one thing that was not a surprise was how I dive into handling stress.
Did I say “dive in”? That may be a blurry description. My favorite way to handle a crisis is to engage my administrative side so that, while looking super busy, I can avoid diving into actual feelings. No surprise then that less than 24 hours after my mother-in-law passed, I had hoisted her entire file cabinet into the trunk of my car for relocation to our house. That file cabinet offered a double bonus: I could be soothed by the call for organization and also take care of any outstanding bills, turn off utilities, and cancel any items that needed canceling.
Some suggested that I dove into that file cabinet a little too quickly. “Hang on, just canceling garbage pick up” is, evidently, not a valid reason for a late arrival at the former account holder’s viewing. Still, as I did a first pass through the files cabinet, I felt the warmth of control wash away the feelings of chaos that come with the death of a loved one.
I feel incredibly lucky that this woman was also an organizational wizard. She was also very old-school in that everything came to her via the postal carrier. I knew within minutes that there would be minimal passwords to chase down. The few passwords that I would need were found fairly easily, tucked on the back page of a tiny calendar tucked in the back of her purse.
Wrapping up someone’s life is one of the strangest things I’ve ever done, but I am learning a lot.
Death is unbelievably expensive. Even with the most basic plans in place (cremation, no service), dying costs so many dollars that I wondered if opening a crematorium was a viable retirement plan. What if we just build a giant chiminea out back…? I’ve said before that grief is not a reliable shopping companion–there are few rational financial thoughts available when sitting in a funeral home just hours after losing someone. Sure there are options for “simple,” but even those start in the thousands and, well, Of course, we’ll take the cremation casket one lined with velvet because it looks so pretty and she would really like that!
Look, none of us want to risk being haunted because we opted for a cheap box.
Relocating the just-passed is also expensive–even if you are not hiring an actual hearse. I didn’t know that private transfers of the unalive were an option. There are drivers at the ready to move bodies from facility to facility. For those who pass during non-business hours, that may mean a trip to the morgue before a trip to a holding facility before a trip to the funeral home before a trip to either a cemetery or crematorium. Is this what Uber drivers do in their off hours? Should I invest in a van? I imagine those passengers must be delightful.
My mother-in-law wasn’t very specific in her wishes about what should happen before her cremation so we opted for a small viewing. Hindsight? We should have skipped it. It’s not that I don’t see the benefit of a viewing but the awkwardness of the event just made it, well, awkward. Did you know that our brains are conditioned to see people breathing even when they are not? Try explaining that to yourself, let alone any grade school attendees.
We have kicked ourselves for choosing a funeral home that was a bit too local. It didn’t dawn on us that we would spend the coming weeks driving by the facility daily, triggering memories of standing around an overpriced coffin saying, “Oh, she looks so pretty,” or “It seems like she could just wake up at any moment” or “I wish we had skipped that.”
FYI: A reputable funeral home will offer a private ”final goodbye.” This is not the same as a viewing, but a more intimate moment without all the pretending that everything is just fine. Ours did and we have no idea why we didn’t simply go with that rather than a formal viewing. Grief is not a reliable decision-making companion.
Wrapping up someone’s life is one of the strangest things I’ve ever done.
There is a constant worry that I am dropping a ball somewhere that is going to turn into a disaster. There is also a new need to set my children up for success when it is their turn to shut my life down. My mother-in-law had the smallest digital footprint on the planet and, yet, it has been challenging to wrap up her life on the interwebs. If I drop dead tomorrow, how can I make it as simple as possible for those I’ve left behind? A post-it note with one single password used across nine million platforms that I updated every 90 days? Forgo “safe” passwords altogether and just opt-in to identity theft?
For a glimpse of this process, here are some experiences with the turning off of all the things:
- Garbage Collection: Five stars. Simple to cancel. I’m not even sure if the company asked for a reason and they certainly don’t seem concerned about the non-returned can.
- USPS: Mail Forwarding: Four stars if you fill out a paper form picked up at the post office. One star if attempted online. Either way does involve a bit of forgery.
- Cell Phone Provider (Verizon): This started as a five-star and went downhill. I made one phone call and transferred to the “team that handles that.” That team helped me to take any voicemails or pictures off my mother-in-law’s phone that we might want to preserve. That was difficult as I then sat listening to voicemails left by friends before learning that my mother-in-law had passed and then those voicemails shifted to grief as many left just one more message. Turns out that calling one last time is quite a common way of grieving. My heart cracked many times as I listened but no more so than when I heard my husband’s voice. Once I had cleaned off the phone, Verizon kindly turned it off. That felt so strange. What would happen to her phone number? Would it be reassigned immediately? I was surprised to receive a large bill from Verizon weeks later as I hadn’t returned the phone, mainly because I didn’t know I was supposed to. I was even more surprised when I tried to return the phone to the local store and was sent home with instructions to call corporate for a mailing label. I now hope that Verizon isn’t too surprised when they realize I gave up and will now hold that phone hostage forever. Downgraded to two-stars but only because I’m feeling generous.
- Medical Facilities: Three stars and that’s an average across the board. I called numerous medical facilities to let my mother-in-law’s healthcare teams know that she had passed. All were very kind. Some even sent sympathy cards. Others sent final invoices. One is still calling about a missed appointment fee.
- Cable (Comcast): Zero stars. Are we really surprised? Good grief. I have never seen a cable bill as tiny as my mother-in-law’s. She clearly had the most basic of all the basic services (this may explain the 24-hour Matlock marathon running in her living room since 2022). Her account was in good standing. I assumed that canceling cable the deceased would be an easy task but, alas, I was mistaken. Comcast was not interested in losing a customer even if that customer was no longer with us. We’ll need a death certificate. An original copy. I had none on hand (yet). Okay, we can transfer the service to a new address in the meantime. Um, what? I have now gotten a bill for the missing equipment. I have yet to find any equipment.
Do people often fake their own death to get out of paying their cable bill? Even those cable bills that are in good standing? And why was I surprised that Comcast would put up the biggest fight when it came to closing down someone’s life?
Should I maybe have invited them to the viewing?
As we continue to wrap up my mother-in-law’s life, we are working on a plan to make this process as easy as possible on our children. That current plan involves a business card that we an hand our kids and instructions to call if something should happen to us. They really are baby adults and the thought of either digging through this muck at this stage in their lives is just too much. We will also work on an “I’m Dead, Now What” binder like the one found here. This is not a sponsored ad…just a really, really good idea.