Death bureaucracy

“It’s so hard to die in this country!”

Bimala is my friend now, the person in my local bank branch who is helping me with my mom’s estate account.

My mom died.

Did I tell you?

It’s still surreal, the swiftness of the call about the ambulance, the primal pain for a week, the moment of death, just as I walked back into the room with a pizza from Armando’s, the first place I ever ate pizza from. “I’m back with the pizza,” I said. One more breath.

My aunt and I ate it, an hour later. My sister with the food allergies waited to get home to try to find something she could eat. I took the pillow, the one from the My Pillow guy my mom hated. I meant to bring her a good pillow but it was the wrong one. She died on that pillow anyway.

“It’s so hard to die in this country,” says Bimala. “In Nepal, you just take the body to the mountains, you mourn it, maybe erect some white flags. Talk about the person.”

My sister and I have spent at six solid days packing up the house, carting things away. Touching everything. The accumulation of life, with no place to go. It’s not fun, discovering things. It’s awful. Eight decades, decanted into boxes with only a ghost of an idea of what all the pieces meant to her. Her name was Pat.

I’ve been at the bank at least six times, on the phone for literally days with banks, insurers, lawyers, real estate agents, stagers, painters, people who might be willing to come and pick up the unwanted furniture from my mom’s house, but only on Thursday, with no time guaranteed, and if we’re willing to put it out at the curb. Every piece weighs at least 50 kilos. My mother’s life, too heavy to let go of simply, too encumbered for the space to remember her.

The bank has to be cajoled to pay for the funeral lunch out of my mom’s estate account, with a half hour discussion about why the funeral home didn’t pay for the lunch, whether the Gee-o-vann-i club really was a funeral lunch. I stay patient, not shouting “look at the obituary, look at the date, do you really think I hosted a party and now I’m trying to somehow shaft the estate?” The estate that is us, the orphaned middle aged children. “I have never HEARD of a Mercy Lunch,” says the estate lady on the phone, suspiciously. The lawyer’s retainer takes another three hours, three visits to the bank, a simpler invoice, scanning and sending for my sister’s signature.

“Dying is free in Nepal,” Bimala assures me. “I will go home to die after this experience.”

My mother’s family doctor calls, annoyed at the paperwork. Doesn’t condole in any way. Sighs heavily at his work load. “I’m going to have to charge you for this form.” The form proving to the insurance company that my mother needed to be hospitalized. “She died,” I point out to the insurer. “Isn’t that proof she needed to be hospitalized?” She keeps reading the policy to me. “Could you speak to me like a human being,” I ask. She can’t.

There’s a bill for the ambulance, too. I lose track of the number of people I say “my mother died” to. Most of them say something kind. Many don’t. Her name was PAT I want to say, loudly. They have their forms to attend to. One, from RBC, hangs up on me because he’s frustrated he can’t help me. Hangs. Up.

I’m tired at a molecular level. There is a wedding to go to. I tuck a small bottle of my mother’s ashes in my purse. I put on clothes, in a dream. Everyone is kind. I drink wine, eat cake. Genuinely beam at the couple. I don’t mention my mother in my purse. “She likes to get out,” my sister says. Approving.

After the bank, I treat myself to a cocktail and fancy burger. Decide, when I get home, to do one more task. Take the cable boxes from my dead mother’s house to the post office, with the label I’ve printed out, the bubble wrap I’ve found. Take the medications to the pharmacist for safe disposal, the way we’ve been taught.

“My mother died. Can you please dispose of her medications?”

“You need to take the labels off.”

“What?

“Take the labels off her prescriptions.”

“I tell you my mother died and your response is to tell me to take the labels off?”

She starts to explain while I pluck ineffectually at a label on an arthritis medication. I stop.

“No,” I say. “I can’t.”

I walk away.

Her name was Pat. She was my mother.