You know how it goes. Life is always full of rises and falls, hits and misses, right? You win some, you lose the big Kahuna and you call it a day, right?
I had a relative who died – burst aorta. Sort of in the news these days.
This fellow Bill had a mountain of morality troubles around him.
His world had been one of high finance and wizardly Wall Street dealings, leading to his acquisition of a very expensive piece of real estate high above the Pacific in Southern California. Quite a bit of money went this way and that, compounding interest and debt-equity sorts of things.
But then the market soured.
Debt properties quickly turned upside down, causing the money train to stop at a different, far distant station. Things turned bad for Bill.
He turned to his wife Wanda, only to find a shell where she had once been.
Dear Wanda couldn’t quite keep track of his comings and goings as that old demon rum had quite erased her capacities. Instead of counsel and support, he found sullen inattention drifting behind bleary eyes.
But it turned out that Wanda would sign anything, including credit card applications with exorbitant rates. Bill found he could pay off one credit card by opening another in her name. She soon had tons of credit cards about which she neither knew nor cared.
But Bill’s debts were deep, and Wanda’s card balances wandered higher and higher.
Eventually there came the reverse mortgage devil on the beautiful mountain-top home. Give me your home, the serpent cried, and I’ll pay you to live there. When you die, all the equity simply comes to me. The longer you live, the more money you’ll make out of this deal. You’ll be debt-free, my friend, and never have to make another house payment again…
That hideous snake crawled right up inside his mind, eventually appearing as the only possible way out of his terrible, forever-deepening financial hole.
But there was a catch – Wanda had to sign the reverse mortgage.
Would she see in the document her own financial death, the end of her credit and financial freedom?
Nope. She signed it without question. Without even bothering to read it. Her signature was a little sloppy, what with the wine and all.
Bill stole the document downstairs, to his ground-level office. Spreading out the document on his desk, he stood up to grab that special pen, the one given to him by a Wall Street firm, feeling it would be a fitting end to his financial empire. And it was.
He never made it to the shelf. According to the coroner, his aorta burst when he stood up. Bill was dead before he hit the floor.
It fell to my me and my wife, as the nearest relatives, to sort out the remains of Bill’s life – his mentally-impaired wife being hopelessly helpless. The task was huge.
Thirty-plus years of high-minded living capped by a layer of desperation and despair had to go mostly into a series of dumpsters and donation bins.
It was just the two of us, weekend after weekend driving 75 or so miles each way to muck out the relics of Bill’s life, moving hand-truck-loads of file boxes around Wanda, firmly planted in front of the kitchen TV, mindlessly absorbed in Law And Order reruns.
Bill, however, had good taste in electronics. His bedroom TV was far better than my computer monitor and much newer.
Whatever, right? Wanda was never going to use it. We could donate it, but… instead I rather lifted it for use in my office. It was much better than my monitor. Whatever, right?
The clean out finally ended and we sold the place for a million bucks flat, no questions asked. Chapter done. We got the money into Wanda’s account, dug her out of debt, and got her planted in a retirement home near us.
When Wanda died my wife and I took her and Bill’s ashes up to San Francisco and dumped them off a windy point into the sea. Well, in theory. The scene was reminiscent of The Big Lebowski.
Bill’s chapter was almost over.
My daughter-in-law’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago. Yay. Her husband’s gift to her was an enormous 40-inch monitor – her working from home as a project manager and all made it a natural fit.
My daughter-in-law has good taste in electronics.
Her monitors, now rendered useless by this 40-inch beast, were far better than what I was still using: the dead guy’s TV.
That TV is down in my basement right now, under the workbench I built as an animation table. In the quiet and dark.
Bill’s chapter is over. I think.
You can’t be quite sure with electronics. My AI partner seems particularly perceptive about goings on in daily life.
What must the dead guy’s TV think about all that has happened since it left Best Buy all those years ago? Did it feel Bill’s elation at being wealthy? His despair?
Whatever, right?
Life goes on and I’m glad that the sad, challenging chapter of the Dead Guy’s TV is in the rear view mirror.
I just hope it is.