Like Webster, I am “much possessed by death”

Thirty-six years ago tomorrow, my cousin killed himself in a New Orleans motel room.  He couldn’t live with denying what he was, and he couldn’t live with his father telling him that he was dead, so far as the family was concerned.  The New Orleans police called my father to come identify him and claim his body, because Dad was the only relative they could trace.

Eleven years ago on December 9th, my grandmother died of complications from a broken hip, old age, and grief from burying two of her three children.

Ten years ago on December 8th, my father died of a stroke brought on in part by years of drink.

This afternoon I got a call at work from the Round Rock police department.  Would I please call my brother at {number}, there was a family emergency.  The operator thought it was that Mother’s brother had died.  I said, no, it couldn’t be that because Mother was an only child, but I knew who it was likely to be.

When I called back, my brother C answered the phone.  His answer to my first question proved my gloomy suspicion to be right.  Our brother JP was the one who is dead.

JP never got over his husband’s death eighteen months ago.  He was unable to find a job after he moved back to Texas in the fall of 2004, and almost all the money he’d realized from selling their house in Florida and his share of the money from Dad’s farm was gone.  Although none of us can prove it, everyone in the family strongly suspected he’d started drinking heavily again, and he may or may not have been abusing his psych meds (or perhaps just forgetting to take them altogether).  He refused to do anything about getting any professional help, swore he wasn’t drinking, and generally acted like our family members tend to act in these situations.

C is completely distracted, to the point that he was gabbling like a crankhead (something he’s prone to do when upset).  He’s been fending off Mother, who’s been in a tizzy for several days now because nobody had heard from JP since last Friday and hadn’t been able to raise him on the phone or in email.  C said that while he was dealing with the Arlington police, who didn’t want to hear from him OR from Mother because both of them have been pestering to the point of obnoxiousness about not hearing from JP, and with finding out where the body’s gone (to the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office, because it’s a mysterious death and JP had no primary care physician, so there must be an autopsy), he was telling Mother an elaborate set of lies to keep her from rushing up there in a storm and making matters more difficult.

The ugly part comes tomorrow when C and I have to go together to tell Mother that JP is dead.  He’s leaving from Fort Worth and I’m driving up from Austin.  To keep from setting off too many alarm bells in Comanche before we’re ready, we’re meeting in Dublin and going on together from there.

I told C that I’d deal with the coroner if he liked, and asked what else he wanted me to tend to, since it sounds as though he’s had to tend to much more than enough so far.  I don’t know what he’ll decide he wants to unload.  We can talk that over in the next day or so.  JP left some kind of will, but it may be a mess, because it left everything to his late husband and he never revised it.  At least we won’t have to deal with a full-bore funeral across Christmas as we did with my cousin, as JP wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the Gulf of Mexico.  With luck we can stave off having any kind of memorial service until after the new year.

I ask for your energy and prayers; we’re going to need lots in the next few days.

JPW
12 November 1963 – 21 December 2005