A man's legacy

My father in law died about 2 weeks ago. If you feel a lack of emotion in my sentences it’s mainly because I never met him. I won’t go into the whole detail so you will just have to take my word for it … he was not the best man, husband or father. So I guess I am not surprised he was found dead by the neighbor’s in his apartment building. Already laying there for over a week, so the stench gave him away. After all I do believe in karma. You reap what you sow.

So here I was today. In his apartment. I do not know exactly how I felt digging through a dead man’s stuff … In my rubber boots and gloves, sliding through remaining fluids that were left on the floor, still there, still wet, though they removed the body a week ago. The maggots and mainly dead flies didn’t help with the general impression. My sense of smell is quite poor and my stomach made of steel … so at least that wasn’t an issue and hence I made the perfect candidate for this specific service. We needed the identification cards for the funeral. Though at the end the smell wasn’t “so bad” so all four of us dig into it.

Oddly the head print and some left over hair on the kitchen cabinet, where he probably hit his head, didn’t faze me so much as digging over his jeans pockets looking for the wallet. Like I was expecting for the pants to be still warm or something. Knowing it was probably the last thing he wore and just left on the floor, the wallet and pocket change still in them. It just felt … wrong.

We gathered all the papers we could find and waited for the fumigation man to come around. The cleaning crew comes tomorrow. And this is it. All that is left at the end. A bunch of papers, a pool of body fluids, an unknown number of children, a bunch of resentment and practically zero empathy or sorrow.

What a legacy to leave behind.