The Funeral Money My Brother Moved

The eleven thousand dollars was separate from all of that bill paying. Years back, when Dad was still alive and feeling his age, Mom had gone to Severson’s, the funeral home that has buried three generations of our family, and sat down with Myron Severson, who buried his own father there before he ever buried anybody else’s, and the two of them worked out what’s called a pre need plan. The casket, the vault, the opening and closing of the grave next to Dad’s, the obituary, the register book, all of it locked in at the price it was that year, paid off over time, so none of it would be Dennis’s or my problem later and so inflation couldn’t eat into what she’d set aside.

But a pre need plan doesn’t cover everything a family ends up spending on a funeral, and Mom knew that, because she had sat in that same office and watched Myron go down the list with her. The luncheon in the church basement afterward. The flowers if the ones from the plan weren’t enough. Travel money for her sister’s family coming up from Nebraska. A stone, since Dad’s double headstone already had her name and birth year cut into the granite, waiting, and a stone like that runs real money, more than people think until they’re the ones paying for it. So on top of the pre need plan, she had been setting aside a little every month for eleven years, out of her own small pension and what was left of Dad’s social security, into a separate savings account at First Dakota, specifically so none of that would fall on either of her kids.

Eleven thousand, two hundred and some odd dollars, exactly, the week she went into Prairie Crossing. I know the number because I’d helped her balance that passbook more than once at this table, and because she had said to me, more than once, with that same roasting pan in her hands, that’s mine, Peg, I earned every dollar of it, and nobody touches it but Myron Severson the day he needs to.

**

I need to say something honest about Dennis here, because it is too easy to make him into a villain with no reasons, and that isn’t the truth of him.

Dennis lost his job at the implement dealership in April, after eleven years there, when the ownership changed hands and the new owners from out of state cleaned out half the sales floor to save money. He is fifty two years old, in a town where the only other work that pays anything close is at the ag co op or driving a propane truck, both of which hire younger men first. His truck payment is four hundred and ten dollars a month and he was three months behind on it when all this happened. His wife Brenda works the register at the grocery store on Main and between the two of them they were barely keeping their lights on, and Dennis is the kind of man who would rather lose a tooth than ask his little sister for two hundred dollars.