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I have come to a startling, but perhaps not unexpected, realization in the last 24 hours:
The funeral industry is THE biggest scam, ever. Can you believe that some places want to charge us $1500-$2500 for a straight cremation with no memorial service or even an urn? Gah, times eleventy. Plus there are about a million details in the cremation/paperwork process and I have to check every single one with every funeral home. I'm tearing my hair out in great big clumps.
How we're going to pay for this without her death benefit is a mystery, and we can't get her death benefit without the paperwork from the funeral home, which we don't get until we pay them with money that presumably we would get from the death benefit. *head spinning* Meh. We'll figure it out.
It looks like we'll be holding my mother's memorial "coffee, tea, and cake" get-together in the auditorium at Riverview; that way the money goes to the facility that took such good care of her in her last days. It will probably be on June 11th, 12th, or 13th, depending on when the site is available. I have absolutely no idea how many people to order food for, since my mother's work touched so many people's lives, many of them students -- and she saw hundreds of those during her career. Insert more hair-tearing here.
A call to the Winnipeg Humane Society revealed that I can get a hand-painted 6"x6" ceramic tile (which I would create at Brushfire) for my mother for considerably less than the $1000 listed on their website. That might actually be within our reach.
Yesterday Terri and her husband Roger helped George and I to clean the essential/valuable/legal stuff out of my mother's apartment -- four heavy boxes plus her TV and VCR, her computer, some toolboxes, and other odds and ends. Terri and Roger will be forever on my heartfelt "thank you" list. I woke up this afternoon with every muscle in my body screaming in protest, but at least now if her apartment burns down we have everything that's really necessary.
Oh, and happy birthday, Terri! :-D
Tomorrow I'll be getting a bunch of calls back and will have to make a whole lot more. On Thursday I'll go and set up my mother's memorial account, after which I'll be able to submit her obituary to the newspapers.
It's a hard process. I just have to take it one day (and sometimes one hour) at a time. Thanks, and many thanks more, to everyone who's phoned and posted words of encouragement. This is one of the most difficult times of my life, and you're all making it that much easier.
Time to go have a shower and then step out to get a few groceries (as much as I'd REALLY like to just crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head). We're down to literally nothing in the household.
The funeral industry is THE biggest scam, ever. Can you believe that some places want to charge us $1500-$2500 for a straight cremation with no memorial service or even an urn? Gah, times eleventy. Plus there are about a million details in the cremation/paperwork process and I have to check every single one with every funeral home. I'm tearing my hair out in great big clumps.
How we're going to pay for this without her death benefit is a mystery, and we can't get her death benefit without the paperwork from the funeral home, which we don't get until we pay them with money that presumably we would get from the death benefit. *head spinning* Meh. We'll figure it out.
It looks like we'll be holding my mother's memorial "coffee, tea, and cake" get-together in the auditorium at Riverview; that way the money goes to the facility that took such good care of her in her last days. It will probably be on June 11th, 12th, or 13th, depending on when the site is available. I have absolutely no idea how many people to order food for, since my mother's work touched so many people's lives, many of them students -- and she saw hundreds of those during her career. Insert more hair-tearing here.
A call to the Winnipeg Humane Society revealed that I can get a hand-painted 6"x6" ceramic tile (which I would create at Brushfire) for my mother for considerably less than the $1000 listed on their website. That might actually be within our reach.
Yesterday Terri and her husband Roger helped George and I to clean the essential/valuable/legal stuff out of my mother's apartment -- four heavy boxes plus her TV and VCR, her computer, some toolboxes, and other odds and ends. Terri and Roger will be forever on my heartfelt "thank you" list. I woke up this afternoon with every muscle in my body screaming in protest, but at least now if her apartment burns down we have everything that's really necessary.
Oh, and happy birthday, Terri! :-D
Tomorrow I'll be getting a bunch of calls back and will have to make a whole lot more. On Thursday I'll go and set up my mother's memorial account, after which I'll be able to submit her obituary to the newspapers.
It's a hard process. I just have to take it one day (and sometimes one hour) at a time. Thanks, and many thanks more, to everyone who's phoned and posted words of encouragement. This is one of the most difficult times of my life, and you're all making it that much easier.
Time to go have a shower and then step out to get a few groceries (as much as I'd REALLY like to just crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head). We're down to literally nothing in the household.
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