The Evil Side Lurking After a Death in the Family

After a death in the family, sometimes an evil side emerges.

If you ever want to see a person’s true nature, just wait until there is a death in the family. It seems to bring out the worst in some people. I see it a lot because I sell Sacramento real estate. Invariably, there is generally a trust that holds title and the trustee is selling the home. Or it could be in probate. Some experiences are touching, intimate and sweet, like a seller sharing old photographs of his father as a child, which happened recently. Others involve families stabbing each other in the back with every blunt object they can lay hands to. Ordinary people morph into bozos.

Suddenly, an inanimate object that nobody ever paid a second glance to becomes an object of intense emotional desire. Like a roll of aluminum foil in a divorce — all the stuff in the junk drawer I put there, and my husband cleaned it out, including all of the plastic wrap and aluminum foil! I’ve heard that one before. In some ways, a death in the family is like a divorce. That person has left the hearth.

Back when my mother died in 2002, I put a death notice (for my sister, the executor) in the paper. I was in such grief that I forgot to mention my mother’s sisters and brother. It wasn’t intentional, it was just an oversight. My Aunt Barbara also posted a death notice to correct that mistake. I was OK with it. It didn’t detract from anything; it was in fact a little bit embarrassing that I could have made such an error. Then her boyfriend posted a death notice in the St. Paul Pioneer Press because he wanted to accentuate her activism, and even though a staffer at the Star Tribune wrote a nice obituary about my mother, he didn’t feel it explored the depth of her commitment to the causes they both cared so deeply about.

Now that my brother John Burgard has died, I am seeing similar struggles within my own family but this time it is adversarial. It’s more like the upheavals I see among my clients after a death in the family. My sister-in-law removed all photographs of my brother’s family from the Celebration of Life. She excluded my brother’s side of his family from the death notice in the Star Tribune as well. Was it an oversight? I don’t know, my brother was sick for many years. She is grieving, I’m certain. But it is causing a lot of uproar in Minneapolis, among my sister and my brother’s childhood friends.

Far as I’m concerned, my parents abused and later abandoned my brother, and his wife’s family rescued him from a life that had been spiraling out of control due to a drugs and alcohol addiction during his teenage years. I am grateful to her. If my brother’s wife wants to name her parents as my brother’s parents, I don’t really care. If she wants to name her sister as my brother’s daughter, again, not my rodeo. My brother had only one child, but you know how people are, and sometimes families form among those who are not related to you. I am simply sorry for all of the sorrow that everybody feels in this situation.

To try to fix this for my sister, I offered to submit a death notice to the Star Tribune. The paper later refused to publish and would not accept my five hundred bucks. Said my sister-in-law would not allow a second death notice. I guess times have changed since my mother died, or maybe the paper was tired of the fighting among relatives after a death in the family.

When my grandmother died in 1988 (my father’s mother), her next-door neighbor had called me. Before I could fly to Denver, though, my father had cleaned out her house. He swooped in and stole everything. Cremated the body and split. My grandmother had given me a photograph of her when she was 19, in 1919, with a cute fingerwave bob-cut that was so risqué at the time. That’s what I cherish. The rest of the stuff after a death in the family? It’s best to let go.