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.
