I've thought about writing about the fact why I haven't written here for a long time but I also wanted to just start writing like nothing has happened and just shrug my shoulders: "Well, this is who I am, take it or leave it".
But the thing is, I can't think of anything else to write about.
My mom died in a car accident about two months ago.
She was perfectly healthy, retired, enjoying life, driving to visit her brother and his wife and in a blink of an eye she no longer was. Alive. My sister called me just few hours after the accident, after she got the call from the police. The police had tried to contact me too, apparently tried to come and tell me the message in person but as there is a renovation going on in my apartment (which is a whole other story) and at that particular day we were away for the whole day because the renovation dudes were here, so my sister ended up calling me and delivering the news. For the second time in our lives. My dad had a heart attack 2006 and died immediately. My sister called me then too.
So what I've been doing for the last two months is calling and leaving messages to the police, bank, insurance company (three different departments in there which none can do all the things that need to be done), mom's property manager, real estate agent, emptying mom's house, including dealing with everything related to the funeral and also writing passive aggressive messages to the renovation company which is procrastinating with everything, the property manager of my apartment and the cooperative housing management because the repair of the water damage which is there because the rain water pipes leak inside the concrete wall is taking too long. But as I said that's a whole nother story but I'm just saying that we informed the property manager of a mold in one wall and distinct mold smell May 12th. And our upstairs neighbor informed the maintenance of a bulged wall paint about a month ago before that, in the middle of April. And for a long time nothing happened. Now we've had a dryer blowing here for over 6 weeks and the wall has been drilled open over 5 weeks ago. When ever it rains, we can see the water dripping down the rain water pipe inside our home and watering the concrete floor.
Frustrated isn't a strong enough word.
Just saying.
Also I've been trying to focus on my work which is nearly impossible half of the time and also I should be reading stuff because my fine art photography studies continue soon.
But when it's silent it's impossible to concentrate because every time it gets quiet I see my mom's last seconds repeating in my mind as if I was sitting in the car right next to her and I see her reaction just before the crash. And I can't get that out of my head.
And the second thing that just keeps on creeping into my brain is the moment when we wen't to get my mom's personal items from the police station and I took her phone and it was just slightly bent. Not like a battery bulge but bent. Lengthwise. I don't want to think about the sudden force of the crash but I do.
I knew she used no pin number or finger print to open the phone and I tried if the phone still worked so that we could contact everyone she had been in contact with and the phone wasn't even shut down but just sleeping and I opened and there it was. The 112 app. The emergency app was open. And that was all that my brain needed.
For my brain it doesn't matter if I accidentally touched the app and opened it when I opened the phone or if there's some smart feature that opens the app if something drastic happens to it, which would be kinda good thing but then again pretty stupid because if you were just walking on a bridge and you drop your phone but it doesn't break immediately when it lands but opens the emergency app and the phone calls to the emergency services for you and perhaps even sends data that some sudden collision has happened and yeah. I know. There's no such feature in any app or phone.
But my brain doesn't care.
My brain just keeps on creating different scenarios, some are stupid, some more stupid and some just horrible.
I can't stop thinking that my mom opened the phone and the app after the crash. Before she died.
And it's no use me saying to my brain that don't think about it.
If I try to read for my studies, if I try to sleep, if I try to think something else, all these thoughts just replace my not so important things. Like falling to sleep.
I've taken zero film photos since that day.
That day, at that very moment I was out avoiding the renovation and buying a not so popular battery from a special battery dealer for my Canon APS film camera to which I got old film from my trusted film dealer. For free. Because it's old. And some other customer had brought it there to give away. But I never tried the camera. I never even put the battery in. Or the film.
On that day I went to my son's apartment to get the 3D film adapter that he had printed for me because he has a bigger printer. An adapter that allows you to use 135mm film in a 126 film cartridge camera. That's when I got the call from my sister.
I've taken just few digital photos.
Mostly from my moms home.
We have to sell it. And that feels bad. And not only for the obvious reason but also because I hate the fact that someone will benefit from our bad situation. It's a really bad time to sell a house. But as we can't keep it as long as we would want to, I fear that we have to sell it for a really low price. I hope for the best but it doesn't matter because my brain knows the facts.
It's incredibly hard to get up from the bed in the morning.
Everything weighs so much. Bureaucracy, the renovation, my work that usually is fun isn't fun anymore but a chore, my studies that also isn't fun anymore but a dark cloud in the back of my mind because I know I should do things and also of course the money. Ah the money. I was doing okay but you know, dying is expensive. And the fact that before you can pay invoices from someones bank account you have to pay the bills first and go through tons of bureaucracy (and do it five times again because the banks and insurance agencies can and do miss thinks and stall everything) and also pay extra in order to get things paid. Plus then there's the renovation that has prolonged and will cause extra money pits.
Until this day I thought that I won't write anything about any of this here. But as I do enjoy writing here but, as I already wrote, haven't gotten around to do that because the only thing I can think is this all, so I thought that perhaps it would just make things easier to write about my mom's death. But now that I've written about it... I don't know. It seems to make no difference. Now I'm just left pondering do I publish this or not.
I never told anything to my employers because my work hasn't started yet. One of them is a very kind hearted and a really nice person, I always end up speaking with her so long in the phone. About everything! She has such a nice personality and sense of humor that it's always so good to speak with her. But the length of the calls... it's just so draining. So I made a decision that I won't tell because I would be absolutely exhausted after that kind of talk. And I can't even imagine how long that call would be.
I am also an entrepreneur and I see my customers, that I have known for years, frequently, but nevertheless I chose not to tell them either about all this. It's not that I can't tell them about this. That's not the hard part. It's just that after that I would have to do my job. And that would be incredibly hard to do because people wouldn't act normally around me after that and that would be a problem. I wouldn't know how to concentrate to my work after that.
I've actually have had a fear that someone would come and express their condolences and then I wouldn't be able to do anything.
But fortunately that hasn't happened and hopefully never happens at the wrong time and place.
I wanted to see my mom. Open casket. Before the funeral. Back in 2006 I went to see my dad with my mom and sister and now we went to see my mom with my sister and her daughter.
The driver of the funeral car told us that he does not recommend seeing her and explained why. I was still determined to see her, I don't know why. Perhaps because I did see my dad, perhaps because till that day someone had only said to me that my mom was dead and I had not seen her after that. Anyway my sister and her daughter hesitated. So we agreed that I would go first and then tell if I recommend it. I did that and didn't recommend, so they didn't go to see her before the casket was closed again.
Seeing anyone who has been dead for a while and has distinguished marks of physical trauma is of course bad, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. I actually think it would have been worse if my mom would have looked like she was just sleeping, slightly pale, like my dad was almost 20 years ago and I just thought that if I touch his wrist he would wake up and say: "Just kidding!"
I did touch his wrist and it was cold. Really cold.
I looked at my mom's face and compared the tiny details of her dead face to her living face that I remember and tried to look for the same tiny things that make her, her. But most of those were gone. The details that a living skin has were no longer there. She was my mom but then again she wasn't my mom anymore. I tried to memorise the dead person's face who laid there in my mom's coffin but although I did look at her for a long time, I no longer remember that well what she looked like. Which is a good thing I guess. I actually remember her face very well when she was alive.
I touched her wrist through the white cloth and it was cold. Really cold.
I've had couple of proper melt downs. Not just the typical sadness that is expected in funerals, crying and not being able to talk but a proper "fuck you" moments.
One of them was when I got an invoice from the insurance company that my moms traffic insurance for the upcoming next three moths should be payed soon. Now the first time I called to the insurance company she has the traffic insurance from was two days after the car accident and the lovely lady there said that the traffic insurance will end to the day she crashed the car and that everything would be dealt with and that I shouldn't worry. Yeah right. Famous insurance customer service words before all the worries they will cause.
So I called right after I opened the invoice. After the first call and before this one I have had to call the insurance company several times for various reasons. It's always the: "Select one if you... select two if you... select three if you... thank you for waiting... pling, pling, plong, thank you for waiting... pling, pling, plong..." Finally when I got through, there was again some new customer service person, I had to explain them what has happened and prove who I am and I told them that the car is just junk now and this is what I was told and can you just do what I was promised and end the traffic insurance? She said no. Can't do. In order to end it we need this and this and this. I explained to her that I can't get you these things before you give me this and this and this. My worry is that we have to keep paying the insurance of a car that no longer is a car because the insurance company has trouble deciding if they should reclaim it and pay for the accident and make a proper statement of that which we can take to the person who makes our estate inventory and can finalize it and they claim that the need the estate inventory to end the traffic insurance, which isn't possible because they have not yet given us the statement which is needed for the estate inventory. The customer service saw no trouble in that impossible circle. I started seeing red.
The customer service person wanted to direct me to someone more wiser but alas, no-one answered so she was stuck with me. There was this thing that I didn't know to ask which she, in my opinion, should have known and we would have gotten somewhere from that impossible situation where she thought that I should give them a paper which is impossible to do before they've given me the certain paper that I need which they can't give me and... you know.
I. Had. A. Proper. Melt. Down. On. The. Phone.
Fucktard.
It was Friday.
I sure hope I ruined her weekend.
Next Monday I called to the insurance agency (again) to get things going forward. "Select one if you would like to release a fart and rotten eggs bomb in our office. Select two if you would like to grease our floors, door handles and toilet seats. Select three if you would like to make us listen these two (1) (2) songs in repeat all work day long.
The short version: they do not know where my mom's car is so that they could make any decisions about it's condition and it's reclaim and about the compensation. Except they do have a paper from the police, which they have requested that has been sent to them a while ago. But they still don't know where the car is. Except it reads on the paper which they have requested from the police which they have had a while. But they still do not know where the car is because they've gotten the information a while ago so they can't be sure if the car is still there.
This is the short version.
I actually asked them that are you kidding me. And I regret that I didn't also ask that do they need a forward poker who tells them to do stuff in the same way as you tell a child or a teenager that now that you have the washed clothes there, in front of you, go pick it up and put it in to the closet or wear it and don't complain that you don't have clean clothes. Like, straighten your arm, bend your fingers and grab the clothes, lift them up and choose.
So I called the police. The car is still there where it was taken on the day of the accident.
The next day I called the insurance company again and told then that the car is still there, go check it out. And for the first time I talked to someone I had talked with before. It was the same person who I talked with the day before. She said that she actually has the papers in front of her and remembers me. And then the fucking customer service person had the audacity to say to me that: "Oh, we don't actually have to go there and see it. It can be decided without seeing it if it can be redeemed."
OH FUCKITY FUCK!
I did not have a meltdown at this time. I just laughed and said that I regret not calling you about this thing earlier, like four every second day since the accident because that way this thing would have already been resolved.
I did have couple of other melt downs too and I have to say that those people deserved it. I tend not to be very kind in my words when I'm angry. I never say anything personal like how someone sounds or looks or what sex they are but there's still plenty of stuff to make people really regret about the fact they had an encounter with me and made my day worse than it was.
I'm not proud of that talent but I also am not sorry.
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So that's why I haven't written here for a while.
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Now I just have to decide if I publish this or not.
How are you all, I've heard there's a lot of bad things happening in the world. Or am I just doomscrolling because I feel so bad so I make myself feel even worse.
