Ask Lemmy

My family had an interesting experience with this

My mom's cousin was a wonderful woman, I don't think there is anyone who would have anything bad to say about her.

Her husband was a piece of shit. I'm not going to go into all of the ways he was a shitty person, I'll just leave it at he was an illiterate moron who wasted all of their money, never held down a job for long, weighed probably well in excess of 300lbs (my mom, who is not petite by any definition, could fit in one of his pant legs) bought stupid cars and all kinds of shit for himself, and his wife had very little despite usually being the sole breadwinner of their household.

She got sick, my mom helped make arrangements for what would happen with their dogs when she passed because fat ass definitely wasn't going to take care of them.

The day she died my mom was over helping take care of her, I was on my way over to pick up the dogs, I'm a couple blocks away and get a frantic call from my mom telling me not to come over, because he came downstairs with a shotgun and was talking about ending it.

I pulled up outside, my mom met me at the porch. He'd calmed down a little, I made sure cops had been called.

I go inside, there's her cousin gasping for air beating down deaths door on the couch. He's sitting in the kitchen, fucking around on his computer, distraught but not even giving a moment's thought to his wife dying in the other room. He's clearly more upset that no one's going to take care of him than anything else. The shotgun is leaning in the corner of the kitchen.

We decide it's best if I don't stay long and I don't pick up the dogs at that time.

I get on my way, cops come soon after, confiscate all of his guns. She passes, my mom gets the dogs and gets them to their new homes.

Fat ass never has a funeral for her, and definitely never tried to reach out to any of us.

Some months later my mom and grandmother are going to check out a new store that recently opened. They were driving near that house, and fat ass, being who he was, had recently purchased a ridiculous new Camaro, probably with life insurance money that most people would have used for a funeral.

My mom makes a small detour to drive by and show my grandmother that car, when they see several police cars and an ambulance turn down the same road, and sure enough they stop right in front of the house.

My mom pulls up and asks what's going on, afraid that maybe he had done something to the neighbors, they've had issues before.

Turns out that they'd gotten a 911 call from the house, from a woman, who I don't believe was never identified, we suspect probably a prostitute.

Fatass had a heart attack and keeled over dead.

She called 911, grabbed his computer and maybe a few other small valuables, nothing in particular that we noticed missing, and ran off never to be heard from again.

Good for her.

My mom was still listed as the executrix of their wills, so it fell on her to untangle their debts, see what could be salvaged, etc. it wasn't much.

I'm especially salty about the whole situation because the house originally belonged to my mom's aunt/he cousins mother. It had been paid off years ago, and at one point the plan had been for the house to be left to me, since her daughter didn't have any kids, and most other branches of that side of the family were also dead-ends, I sort of represented the future of the family.

But when her daughter married fatass, since he kept wasting all of their money she let them move in because they would have probably been homeless otherwise, and they got the house when she died. They took out loans against the house, he didn't really keep up with any sort of maintenance, etc. to call it a fixer-upper would have been an understatement.

My mom's main priority was to have a proper funeral for her cousin, and had her ashes buried.

She never bothered to claim his remains from the coroner's office. They tried to reach out to his kids from other relationships, other relatives, etc. and none of them wanted anything to do with him either.

After a certain amount of time, the coroner's office here cremates the remains, and if they're still not claimed I believe they eventually have them scattered or buried somewhere.

I'm not someone who cares much about what happens with my, or anyone else's body, once they die. Once you're dead you're dead, and your corpse deserves no more respect than any other slab of expiring meat. I'd just as soon throw bodies unceremoniously into an industrial composter.

Many people of course have a different idea of that, and I'm willing to respect their beliefs.

But I think fatass should be more-or-less the model we should follow for bad people. Everything is carried out respectfully, but without ceremony, no fancy headstones, no elaborate funeral ceremony, and no easy way for mourners and kooks to make a pilgrimage site from it.

In some cases where religion and culture and such dictate that a body shouldn't be cremated, I would support burial at sea, unmarked graves, or plain graves in in an area where they can be visited by family but not the general public.