As always, I'm sorry (in retrospect) for the absence of postings.

As you might imagine, I haven't been doing anything that blogworthy over the past few days.

Having undertaken to work with various organizations involved in making the necessary final arrangements for my mother, I've been lost in a wilderness of phone calls and emails from Rob Roy, at the funeral home, who just can't be as disorganized and incompetent as he seems to be.

I think I've gotten what we want (or, rather, what Mom wanted) communicated to him successfully. For the most part. One battle I did not win was over the obituary. I failed to persuade Rob Roy either that it mattered to me that punctuation was used correctly or that I prefer traditional spellings of words, regardless of the fact that his company makes up their own spellings sometimes.

I think succeeded in persuading him that all of those names I laboriously spelled for him over the phone should, inf act, be spelled that way.

At one point, the R.C. pointed out that no one is going to know or care that an obituary in a local paper isn't grammatically accurate or contains oddball spellings. Most of the people reading it won't know good punctuation from bad punctuation. At that point, I realized I was becoming obsessive and I gave the go-ahead for Rob Roy to do it his way.

The R.C. and I fly out on Sunday and may see a family member or two that evening, others who are flying in for the service. The service is on Monday morning--it will be short, with just a small gathering. Then a little necessary paperwork, and the R.C. and I fly back home on Monday evening.

Thanks to the L-i-K-S's assistance, I won't have to be returning to Joplin at any time. She's transported the rest of Mom's stuff to her own place. I'll need to plan to go back there in a couple of weeks to finish the sorting and ship back here anything I want personally or have volunteered to handle the disposal of.

That leaves only the house to be dealt with. Fortunately the L-i-K-S has a good Estate lawyer who is going to help us weed through the morass of paperwork and laws to find out: (1) if Mom had mortgage insurance, (2) if that contract/deed sale to her nephew is acceptable to the bank or if they'll be coming back to us for money if the nephew ceases making payments ten years from now, and (3) what this means in terms of winding up Mom's "estate" and filing final tax papers and suchlike.

I shudder to think how long it takes to do this stuff for anyone who has an estate, you know? Although, I guess anyone with a lot of money/stuff to leave would probably have been more conscientious about 'planning' in advance. (I'd also imagine that families with more money have to worry about this or that person getting weird over the money. Mom trusted that the four of us wouldn't go peculiar.)

We're peculiar, but not really about money.