Sorting Through the Mysteries of Bills and Crap

I always knew that U.S. Rep. Tim Walz was an honorable and caring man. From the first time I met him in March 2006, he amazed me with his ability to remember peoples names and the way he genuinely cared for the people he met. That is why I volunteered my time and resources to help get him elected. That is why I went to work for him. He reminded me of that this morning.

Congressman Walz called me this morning to express his condolences. Unfortunately I missed the call. I slept through the night and didn’t get out of bed until 0830. I was brushing my teeth when the phone rang and didn’t get to it until too late.

I am greatly appreciative of that phone call.

One of my few complaints with the Blackberry Storm is calls seem to go to voicemail much too quickly. Oh well, still love that phone.

Every day seems to bring some new learning experience. There are so many little things that we all do everyday and never think about what the people left behind would do or know if we were suddenly taken from this world.

I pay bills online and I think most everyone does. I have paper copies of the statements sent to me, but not everyone does. This has become a problem with trying to sort out my mom’s bills.

Mom embraced the electronic world and paid almost everything online. She set most of her bills up as automatic bill payments. Mom was scared of identity theft so she did not have paper statements sent to her home. We kind of knew what her bills were and discussed it with her, but now, we have no idea what these things coming out of her account are or who they go to.

In order to figure this out, we have instructed the bank not to honor automatic payments since she is deceased. When the company requesting payment does not receive payment, the thought is that they will send a paper statement informing her that the bank declined a payment. This will allow us to close out her various accounts and inform her creditors that she has died.

As I said, I get paper statements so if I died tomorrow, someone would be able to figure my bills out. Make sure someone knows what your automatic or online bill payments are. Write this information down and keep it somewhere. Someday it will prevent a lot of headaches for someone else.

My mom was a bit of a packrat. Ok, that is a true understatement - she saved a lot of crap. We talked to her repetitively about going through all this crap in her basement and she always said we would get around to it later. Unfortunately, later never came.

We didn’t want to push her too hard and perhaps we were too lenient. I don’t know how I would react with the news that I was going to die and with that in mind, we did not push her to do things. I regret not making her go through this crap with one of us now.

I am quite sure most of this stuff had some special meaning. Why else would she have two hope chests full of shit? The three of us boys can figure some of it out and have figured some of it out. I can figure out that the old report cards with my name on them were saved for a reason. I can figure out what the envelope labeled my first haircut with hair in it is. What I cannot figure out is what a blanket is. It is not labeled; there is nothing to tell us why she had it in the chest. What the hell are we supposed to do with this blanket?

Mom had literally thousands of photos in the chests and packed in 18-inch square boxes. Many of them are not labeled or written on. Some of them are black and white – obviously older than any of us. How are we supposed to figure out what they are or why she had them?

She had crap packed away that belongs with the family of the late asshole she married. We can try to figure it all out, but this would have been so much easier if she would have been willing to do this while she was still alive.

I started to take an inventory of my life and my possessions and it occurred to me – no one could really figure out what all of my crap is either. I need to start figuring out what I have and why I have saved it. I need to make sure that someone else knows why I have it as well.

You never know when it may be your time and there may not be a tomorrow to do it.

I will not make this same mistake twice. I am going to have this talk with my dad and with other family. We need to know what those “valuable” possessions are to prevent ourselves from having to ask, “WTF is this?” in the future.