I am minded to blog about Uncle Cyril. There is already one written a couple of years ago I think but today is a variation on the same theme.
He was an old boy who lived a short distance away from me....he was not my Uncle ...that just what everyone called him....I invited him to the house for a meal and it became a weekly event. It was for him an outing that he looked forward to every week.
When he got sick I visited him, took down the phone numbers of his daughters in case anything happened to him...and I called in to check on him every night on my way home from work.
One morning there was a call from the doctor. Uncle Cyril had died....did I have contact details? Yes I did and before going to school I rang both daughters, neither of whom I had met.
That evening I called in to see how things were going....they had had a busy day....nothing of value remained in the house....clocks, pictures, lamps etc...everything had been removed....I walked up stairs to find the same thing up there...
The daughters had emptied the house in a day...I had no idea how....
At the funeral they looked at me sharply and said
"There's no point in your looking for our mothers jewelry. ...it's all gone.".
Stunned I just walked away....the last thing I was thinking about was jewelry.
Death brings out the worst in people.
It was the first time I'd seen the vultures gather...It certainly won't be the last.
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3 comments:
How awful.
I have heard of such things but luckily have never encountered them.
My family (hooray), are almost too much the opposite, but I thank heaven for their lack of greed.
Did no-one ever even acknowledge how much you had done for the old man? (or recognise how little they had done).
I never saw them again after the funeral but it seems unlikely.
I find it difficult to deal with that sort of thing. My Uncle died last year. His partner was at the hospital with him. None of his children were.
When she got home, they were on the doorstep preparing to go through all of his papers and to remove property. She has to shout at them to stop, to go away. She phoned her son and their solicitor to get it sorted out. They in fact had no rights on anything, it was to be distributed as per his will.
I found it all very sad - as an act of spite, they arranged the funeral as a humanist, rather than Christian, which upset her even more. To this day, she has not been told where his ashes are scattered.
She shared his life for 35 years, and is now discarded. She had the last laugh though, she got the house. :)
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