I’ve contacted various agencies in Texas to inform them that my son’s “father” (again, term used loosely) has passed away, as not a lot of people in Texas short of the relatives that my son’s aunt reached out to know of his passing. One of the agencies that I contacted was the Austin child support office, and I suppose most of you know or remember my… previous dealings with them. At any rate, I requested deletion of my son’s child support case from their systems due to the permanency of his “father”‘s death. You can’t garnish wages or otherwise request support from the contents of an urn. Surprisingly, someone from the state got back to me the same day that I reached out to them for the third time inquiring about this… and proceeded to tell me that they didn’t have protocol for this because “non-custodial parents of minor children don’t normally die” (what?). However, the state was able to confirm his death and is in the process of deleting our son’s child support case from their systems. There is absolutely no need to keep it there, which it would have been for as long as our son was a minor, because of the permanency of his father’s death. There’s no way that wages can be garnished, or support otherwise collected, from the contents of an urn. This gives me peace.

I will find out if our son is eligible for the one-time lump sum death benefit and survivor’s benefits sometime in the middle of April. He is presumptively eligible because his father was on the birth certificate at the time of his death, as he had been for… well, his entire life. If our son is eligible for these benefits I would like him to receive them, and if found eligible, Monster will receive them for the rest of his life due to his developmental and intellectual disabilities. Meanwhile, I continue to wish that all of this had not been… thrown into my lap.

After giving it serious thought, I contacted my son’s “father”‘s sister — terms used loosely because the last time my son saw the other man on his birth certificate was when he was approximately four months old (and is now seventeen years old), and none of these family members have been involved in his life — to see if she could provide me with more information on… what happened. I was hoping that she would be cordial and polite… and as it turned out, she was. That makes me even more glad that I chose to contact her.

She informed me that my son’s “father” rode his bicycle into oncoming traffic. He was immediately killed when he was struck, and even by the standards of being hit by a car, his injuries were brutal and his death was instantaneous. As a matter of fact, his injuries were so bad that the morgue had difficulty conclusively identifying him, even when they went through his wallet to see if that would give them any helpful information. For some reason, he carried… something in his wallet that had my name on it, and it was enough for the morgue to attempt to locate me (although they weren’t successful because this was out of state and they wouldn’t have had my phone number). The morgue even went as far as to try and contact my one surviving parent to see if they could get a hold of me through them, and that was unsuccessful for the same reasons. But by a stroke of sheer luck, his father had died two days later, homeless, having overdosed on drugs. When his daughter — my son’s “father””s sister — came to the morgue to identify his body, she was able to identify my son’s “father”‘s body as well, and manage their cremations. Social Security confirmed his death when I called them and gave them his name, age, and Social Security Number from my child’s custody order. I am still perplexed that I managed to be “family” to my abuser and that they would attempt to make contact with me to… deal with all of this, but I’ll save that for another post to save space.

I’m not sure if I mentioned this in the previous post about this or not (I’ve had to talk to so many people about this that the whole thing has become a bit of a blur in my head, which I can completely understand), but Jefferson County — the county that he died in — confirmed that he had a completed death certificate on file, and they allowed me to order a copy of it for my son’s records. I’ve continued to attempt to make contact with the Austin child support office to see if they can… delete my son’s case from their system, because you can’t pursue child support — or much of anything, really — from a dead man. All of my experiences with the Austin child support office have been negative, so I’m not holding my breath that they are going to shuffle their shoes on this. I’ve reported it to HHSC as well, that way they don’t go searching for an absent parent “for support” when that parent is actually dead. And I’ve applied for the one-time death lump sum (I don’t know what to call it, so we’ll just go with… that) and survivor’s benefits on behalf of my son, which he will get for the rest of his life if eligible due to his disabilities. We’ll be finding out in the middle of April if he has enough work credits, and for that matter recent work credits, to qualify someone to draw off of his record. I know that the amount won’t be large because his criminal history precludes him from employment beyond minimum wage, but something is better than nothing. Meanwhile, I continue to be at peace with his passing.