My last post was made two days before my father-in-law passed away. Since that time it's been as chaotic as I've ever seen it. My garage is full of stacks of boxes that may take a year to finally go through. My FIL kept everything and sifting through the papers is a time-consuming task. Current paperwork for trusts, investments, and various bank and credit card accounts has to be dealt with first. A lot of this is located in Colorado when FIL lived for nearly 30 years. It seemed like a logical thing to shut down credit cards immediately, but we learned the hard way that credits for some things (subscriptions and automatic payments) can only be made back to the card they were set up on. We actually lost some refunds because the cards had already been closed. Live and learn.
When we finally got to email accounts there were hundreds to go through. Because this man had supported several non-profits (some questionable), he had been added to those dreaded spam lists that get sold to unscrupulous people. We had to check each email because we didn't know which were legit and he actually had dealings with and which were bogus (many were). We discovered that when he got the "free" ad blocker (the same one I use) he'd clicked to set up $1.99 monthly support payments forever. Another phone call and discussion. There were a ton of small items like this to deal with.
The USPS mail forwarding service is a joke. Danny has spoken to several people about it from managers to carriers. By their own admission at the facility Claude lived at, the carrier who keeps putting mail in the box "has problems." So why isn't she sorting mail somewhere indoors instead of putting mail in boxes here where she knows people have died. Claude was getting the former resident's mail for over a year. That man left the apartment when he died! And now there are two people with the same address who have died and are still getting mail. So two months later we still have to drive 30 minutes each way to check the mail.
The Colorado investment man that Danny has been dealing with all summer - you'd think that he would have changed the address on correspondence by now, but I guess that would make things too easy.
Anyway, Claude had donated his body to science so we won't have a memorial service for probably close to a year from now. Maybe by then things will have slowed down.
Meanwhile, the grass has kept growing and needed mowing, the corn around us has been picked, the leaves are falling like snowflakes as the season changes. We were supposed to go visit my daughter in FL for Danny's birthday. It would have been a good time for relaxing over a weekend. But the hurricane came, FL gas was hard to find, water still surrounds some of the places we would have needed to access. Then we discovered a leak in the attic. Oh crap! We can't leave it. As I write we're waiting for the guy that replaced our roof to come by this morning.
So while we stayed home Danny ended up with a cold so we couldn't even go out for his birthday (or our anniversary, which is the same day). We just looked at each other and thought, "Oh, well! There's always next year!"
