My Great Aunt Claire was the last of
three elderly sisters to die. None of them had married or had
children, so Claire inherited what few assets her sisters left. Now
the question was what to do with Claire's (and her sisters')
remaining assets. She named no executor, but since I lived next door
to their home and had helped them in many ways, including fighting
with the tax assessor to get their ridiculous taxes reduced, my
siblings and cousins decided I would be the perfect person to handle
all the minutiae that occurs after a death.
I dealt with the funeral home,
cemetery officials, death certificates, and I notified social
security and her pension plan of her death. Because I was on her
checking account I was able to pay all her last bills. Until a
person dies you have no idea how much work is involved in ensuring
the deceased can lie easy in her grave.
Although I was sad Aunt Claire died,
it was true she lived a long and full life, happy I don't know. But
she was 101 when she fell into eternal sleep. She and her sisters
must have baked a million German chocolate cookies for me and the
others who stole them from my cookie tin in the night. I was glad to
do whatever I could to help settle her affairs.
Claire and her sisters had one charity
they supported as much as they could with their meager earnings,
Mercy Childrens' Home. Since she left no will, no provision had been
made for any last donation to help children who needed a home. As
'executor' it was my job to make sure all her funds in her bank
accounts or from the sale of her house and household goods were
divided equally among her heirs—myself, my siblings, and my
cousins.
I was able to do all that without
problems, and, even more amazing, without any fighting among all of
us cousins. I had heard horror stories of families split apart over
the tiniest inheritances or even over a worthless coin collection.
The only glitch was when I was doing a
final walk through the house before meeting with the buyers to turn
over the keys. We showed the house furnished as the realtor thought
that would make it easier for potential buyers to envision how
furniture would fit in the rooms. But after a sales contract was
signed, we had an estate sale and anything that wasn't sold was given
to the Salvation Army, after all the heirs had chosen anything they
wanted, drawing numbers to determine in what order they would choose.
I tell you, it's details, details, details when someone dies.
I was walking through the house,
remembering good times our family had shared. None of us would ever
forget the Thanksgiving dinner when the aunts told us they had cooked
the turkey the day before to save time. No one said a word but it
was the driest turkey we ever ate.
I fondly thought of the little odd
things people sometimes did as they got older. That brought to mind
my own parents and what they told me when I helped them clean out our
family home before their move to a warmer climate. It was a very old
house and still had hot and cold air registers in the floor.
My father whispered to me, “Don't
forget to get the money out of the cold air registers.”
“What?” Did I just hear him say
'money in the registers'?
“You heard me,” he muttered.
“Check all the cold air registers.”
I took the grate off the one in the
living room. In it were three cigar boxes filled with $20 bills.
The same with the dining room and master bedroom. My parents had
squirreled away $2,000.
My husband said to my father, “So
that's why you were always asking for my empty cigar boxes.”
“My gosh,” I yelled. “If
there'd been a fire, all of this would've been lost. Or if you'd
died we'd have sold it not knowing about this money.”
That was when the light bulb turned
on, so they say. I started checking the cold air registers in
Claire's old house. The final tally was $3,500. And no one knew
about this except me. What should I do? What would you do? If I
told the other heirs they would want a share of it, especially Hilary
who just had a darling baby girl.
I had a few qualms about it but I did
what I thought was the right thing. I deposited the cash in my
checking account. Then I wrote a check for the total amount to Mercy
Childrens' Home. Perhaps the other heirs would have agreed but
perhaps not. I didn't want to take a chance with fulfilling what
I'm sure would have been my great aunts' last wishes.
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