Dearest Rachel –
I don’t recall exactly when it was that you set things up so that your parents’ mail would arrive at our place. It would have been after you and I got them to agree to in-home nursing care (which they preferred to the idea of having to be placed in a retirement home, like the Elms, where they placed your grandmother a generation before), but probably not until your dad’s rather sudden passing, since he seemed to be able to keep dealing with less strenuous things like mail up until the end, as his mind was still sharp. And it may not have been immediately after then, as this is the sort of bureaucratic hassle that never felt like it needed to be handled urgently. Still, it definitely took place well before your mother’s passing, as you knew she couldn’t be trusted with it in her condition (and it wasn’t the sort of task to fob onto the nursing team).
In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much as to exactly when; the point is that it was done, since she couldn’t deal with her own mail after a certain point. Indeed, once Bill was gone, she wasn’t really able to deal with that reality; the night after the funeral, she kept asking you where he was, and you had to keep explaining to her that he was gone. Which must have been so heartbreaking for you to have to do; not only were you still coping with losing him (and you proudly acknowledged being “Daddy’s little girl”), but you were having to deal with the fact that your Mom was already pretty much gone herself, as well… although that wouldn’t be finalized for another two years.
In any case, we were now getting the trust documents and the bills regarding her place, the latter of which we would forward on to the trust company when we could – or, since you were going down there regularly (at least for a week every month), you would just bring them down personally. Meanwhile, the former were mostly just for our information, but you let me in on them, since you saw me as the one who understood such stuff; which was probably true, but only on a comparative basis.
However, I did understand enough to notice that, regardless of the number of bills being paid (including the ones to pay the nursing rota), their investments were growing faster than we could send money out to take care of their expenses. If only they had known that they were doing so well; they wouldn’t have felt the need to be quite so tight-fisted about things, and enjoyed their life a bit more before they ran out of time to do so.
But I’m drifting away from my point. The thing is, after your mom passed away, more than seven years ago, we’ve continued to receive mail here at the house, both for her and for your dad, in fact. As a general rule, I actually appreciate it; if I get any mail for them – or yourself, for that matter – I already know I can send it to the recycling bin without bothering to look at any of it. Anyone who, after five, seven or nine years doesn’t know that you or your parents are no longer around to respond to this letter or another isn’t worth my attention. Nevertheless, this morning was a particularly noteworthy day in this regard, as I received five pieces of mail, and more than half of them were for your mother.
I’ll give the Moorings a little benefit of the doubt; for all that it’s ironic to get a mailer that asks (on its splash page side) “Want More Space For Living?” of a dead woman, at least she would still be of age for a retirement home like theirs if she were still alive. Given how long her mother lived, it wouldn’t be out of the question for her, either, although I forget just how old your grandmother was when she passed. Jo would be ninety-six by now; that’s rather pushing the outer limits, now that I think about it.
Meanwhile, while she and Bill would give to an absurd number of NGO charities like the National Parks, one would think they would have noticed that nothing had been arriving for several years by now. Between this sort of thing and the occasional magazine addressed to her or Bill, I don’t know why these organizations haven’t figured out that, if they aren’t getting a renewal request – or more to the point, any money – from an addressee, it’s a waste of time and money for them to keep sending stuff to them; money that could be better spent on whatever it is they’re supposed to be all about, like national parks or something.
And on the subject of national items, there’s that first one in the picture. You and I used to always worry about these, since these masquerade as man-in-the-street, mail-in polls, but they always required your parents to send in some amount of money for “[their] voice to be heard.” If a pollster is asking for money from the people he’s polling, he’s as concerned about their opinion as a grandchild is about a birthday card – which is to say, he isn’t; all he cares about is the money. Somehow, we could never get through to them that this was the case, and they would keep sending their opinions – and their money – to such places.
Which means that, like the charities and publications, they keep sending stuff to them, at a place they never lived, hoping to hear back from them once again (at least fiscally). Ben Franklin claimed that only death and taxes were certain in life, but as the first postmaster general of the nation, you’d think he would have figured out that appeals for money through the mail he managed would get to that point soon enough.
Anyway, I thought I would tell you about this before I chucked them into the recycling bin, since they made up such an unusually large percentage of yesterday’s mail; I thought you might get a chuckle out of that fact, at the very least. Meanwhile, I would hope that you’d keep an eye on me, and wish me well until later, as I’m still in need of it.
Letters to Rachel 