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.