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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.
My Brother’s Dying Wish is to See Bruce Springsteen in St. Paul
Bruce Springsteen sold out St. Paul Xcel in about 5 minutes. © Big Stock Photo
The oncologist at the University of Minnesota said most people diagnosed with soft cell sarcoma don’t live longer than a year, so it’s cutting it close to try to get my dying brother tickets to see Bruce Springsteen in St. Paul this February. He was diagnosed last February and is presently in clinical trials but it won’t save him. The tumors have traveled to his lungs. He’s been valiant about the whole process and refuses to sell his car, although I hear his wife gave away his snowblower.
He asked about the Bruce Springsteen show coming to Xcel Center in St. Paul in February 2016. The Boss is his favorite all time band, and he has never been to a show, if you can believe that. I figured if there is one thing I could do for him is to buy him front row tickets with wheelchair access.
I considered trying to find the promotor of the show, but I don’t know if we want to call attention to my brother’s condition to Bruce himself. I mean, how happy could he be playing to a guy in the front row who, for all practical purposes here, could die right there in the middle of the concert. Fall out of his wheelchair and never get back up. That’s not a warm fuzzy feeling for the audience. Hey, is that a dead guy on the floor?
My first attempt to get tickets was to set my alarm where I am on my wor-cation in Hawaii for 5:30 AM, just so I could be up and at my computer when they went on sale at 10 AM central standard time. I could not sign in. Ticketmaster was blocked from my server. Ack. What to do what do to?? Aha, turn off my VPN, that did the trick! When I got to the site, it said I was a day early, and they went on sale on the 11th, not the 10th. Saved!
Bright and early on the 11th, signed in to Ticketmaster, and it began the countdown to 30 seconds to sale. Then it redirected me to Excel Center, and I lost time. I tried wheelchair access. No such luck. Tried limited mobility, nope. Tried main floor general admittance, no seats. Tried best available, and then every single combination I could think of, and there were no tickets at all.
On top of that, the site had a warning that if I bought tickets with my credit card, I might not be able to transfer the tickets to my brother. What? I waited until all the hoopla died down and tried Stub Hub. Seats with wheelchair access were $1800 each! Ouch. I don’t even know if my brother will still be alive by February. I’ve never in my life not been able to buy tickets online for a concert. It doesn’t feel good to let down my dying brother.
P.S. This is a footnote because I didn’t want this blog sitting all by itself in cyberspace without its conclusion because my brother did end up going to see Bruce Springsteen, thanks to Jon Bream.
Family Visit with My Brother at Curran’s in Minneapolis
John Burgard, Elizabeth Weintraub and Margaret Burgard at Curran’s Restaurant
My sister-in-law’s godfather is one of the owner’s of Curran’s Restaurant, according to my brother, John, which is one of the reasons we stopped for lunch at the old spot on Nicollet at 42nd. This restaurant has been in Minneapolis since the 1940s, back when it began as a drive-in. There are not a lot of old places left anymore, like with any progressive city, the old goes away to make room for the new. We also stopped at Curran’s for lunch because I really craved liver and onions, but turned out that was not served until dinner. Well, grilled cheese sandwiches at Curran’s were fine in the cold, rainy weather of Minneapolis.
Especially since we intended to, pardon my pun, grill my brother about why he stopped talking to us all those years ago, all those years that were wasted, and why he waited until the doctors at the U of M gave him less than a year to live. Cancer waits for nobody. His response was to let it go. Even when I promised we would not make one comment nor further discuss the reasons if he would just tell us, and I begged. But he refused. Probably because he knows we would discuss it, analyze it, tear it apart into shreds, argue about it, apologize for it, just like any other dysfunctional family would do.
My sister said he would respond like this because she has asked him as well. We figured if we waited until after the chemo infusion which, by the way, is fueled in part by alcohol, and all of the pain medication was absorbed into his system, if we waited until he was a bit loopy, well, that was the time to pounce with our questions. Curran’s was as good a place as any. Sort of like truth serum.
My sister also said she has suggested that he write a letter to us, laying out the reasons, but I don’t want a letter. Especially if I receive the letter after he dies. Because then I can’t respond to it and it will haunt me to my death, that being what I could have done to be a better sister. The people in a booth or so over must have thought we were nuts, given the topic of our conversation. But that’s the thing about family, you can pretty much say whatever you think and it is accepted.
Later, my sister confided that it’s entirely possibly my brother does not remember why he stopped communicating with us. It was so long ago. And that’s the premise I believe I will adopt.
I said my goodbyes. I am back home in Sacramento today and ready to finish out the week tackling Sacramento real estate. Will say I have developed a lot of compassion for my clients in these types of situations.
My Brother and the U of M Clinical Trial for Soft Tissue Sarcoma
Margie Burgard and John Burgard at Univ of MN Cancer Care infusion room.
I am sitting on the third floor of the Cancer Care Clinic at the University of Minnesota Hospital with my sister Margie and my brother John as we wait for John’s clinical trial drug to arrive. Medical treatment, with the number of lawsuits going on today, requires verification and authentication and review before any procedure can happen; not to mention this morning’s ECHO scan and EKG and multiple vials of bloodwork, in addition to a visit with his oncologist who did not want to directly answer the tough questions. My brother is diagnosed with soft tissue sarcoma cancer, which has reached his lungs, and these are his last-chance rounds of chemo.
Doc says the rounds of chemo will continue as long as the results show improvement. When pressed, he says the maximum rounds will probably be about 10.
We try to keep a sense of humor about the situation because what else is there to do? We can count the months and tick off the hours we have left on our fingers but none of it will change a thing. My brother is going to die soon, and we can’t save him. We can’t cure him. We can only try to keep him warm, comfortable, and lend a a bit of laughter to the few hours we will get to see him while trying to be outwardly sensible. His diagnosis for soft tissue sarcoma was last February, and the outlook is about a year.
Right now, the Burgard snores are pretty loud. My brother snores. So does my sister. They say I snore somewhat too, but not nearly as enthusiastically as they do. I’m sure I am much more subdued. They are sleeping because we are an hour overdue for the infusion to begin, and my brother’s records had not been updated in some places since last September. The staff assigned to us says they “want to do it right,” and all I can hear is they don’t want to be sued. There is some discussion about weight loss.
To get here, we drove in my rented car in the pouring rain before the sun came up in pitch black darkness. Thankfully the hospital has valet parking. The patient restrooms don’t have automatic faucets, no automatic hand dryers and the lights don’t illuminate upon entry to the restroom. For such a cosmopolitan city, Minneapolis is still in many ways a small town. Small town. Big disease, soft tissue sarcoma.
My sister just woke up because the staff came into the room to give us an update. Margie is wearing her hair wrapped in a scarf to be in “solidarity” with our cancer patient soft tissue sarcoma. She’s kind of a goof. But I tell you this, if I were in the hospital and dying, she is one person I would definitely want in my corner, figuratively and literally.
