I've been asked many times to write my story out. The more I consider the writing of a story at all, the more I want, also, to tell the story of those before me.
I will start small, with one story.
I was 20 years old when I got the call that my mother died. I was sitting in a Friday's parking lot. I had no contact with anyone in my family besides my mother and father, so when I saw my cousin's number pop up, I was confused. I answered immediately. Christina, my age, was asked to call and tell me. Other family members didn't want to speak to me, so they called her, to call me.
She said, "Remy? Hey..uh I have news."
"Okay, what's up T?"
"Aunt Terry's dead. They found her this morning."
I don't remember much about the rest of the night. The next day I woke up and drove to her trailer. The one she had asked me to move into with her not a month before this conversation. I walked in and looked around, seeing that my grandparents had come and taken everything electronic, or remotely valuable. Disgusted, I cleaned up the bed she died in. On the way out, I deleted her contact information from my telephone. I called and handled all the bills that needed cancelling, transferring , etc.
I called my uncle and grandparents. They told me, "Her will said you get everything. She wants to be burned. She said no funeral. Just forget I ever existed, was what she wrote." I drove to my grandparent's house a few days later. I was greeted by a terse 'hello'. A weighty, white box, containing the incinerated life of my mother inside was shoved into my hands by my grandmother. I wrote a check for her being burned. It was about 800 dollars. I looked around to see the two television's my mother had bought for the bedroom and living room a couple months prior set up in my grandparent's home. I asked for those, and everything else they collected. They said, "This shit is all you care about. You obviously didn't care about her. I bet you wanted her to die." I looked my step grandfather squarely in the face and politely told him to unplug the televisions, reminding him of her will. They demanded to keep the larger of the two. In the end, I left with the large television. The one my mother was watching when she died, her only entertainment. It had cigarette burns on the remote. It had been soaked with spilled drinks and smelled of vodka. Burn and alcohol, I recognized it as the smell of mom.
I told them I didn't want the ashes. No one reached out to see if I was alright. I called a lawyer, as my mother had told me to when she passed, to get the insurance policy.
I had no idea how to do this-no family, and I had lost the only person I was close to. She was burnt, laying in my backseat. I wouldn't touch those ashes for another 6 months. They sat in the back of my car, eerily heavy, covered, but omnipresent.
To be continued...
