Rest in Peace, Part II

We buried Daddy the day after his funeral when the ashes finally turned up. We had chosen a spot on the land that still belonged to him - or rather, that we thought belonged to him. We had even checked at the courthouse that the current owner was him.

A week later we got an unsettling letter. The property had been sold at a tax sale in September. For payment of the $200 outstanding and 10% of the market value of the property, sold to the greedy neighbor that my father did NOT want to have the property. There had been a notice in the paper (which we don't read) and there had been a sign tacked up on a telephone pole on the property. That counts as proper notice in those parts.

I dug through records, found the bill, we had it in the list of paid bills, but in the digital world, only the last 6 months were online. We had to pay to have the back statements printed, and mysteriously all other payments on our records were done, but this one was not. Shit. We consulted a lawyer, it would be costly to sue, not sure to win, and then we would have to sell the property to pay for Mom's care. So we decided to be practical and just move Dad.

My brothers did the deed yesterday. We had been planning on planting a dogwood - his favorite tree - on the spot. Instead, they dug him up (luckily, we had marked the spot with some stones), drove to the cemetery where his father had purchased 9 lots because they were on a special deal, and buried him next to his parents and his sister. The view is not so nice from here, we can't plant anything, and it is in the county seat and not in the village he was born and grew up in.

But we do have high hopes that he can now, indeed, rest in peace.