I’m still getting a handle on the fact that someone who I’d known since he was six years old is dead.

To be honest though, I never expected him to live a full life and make it to old age.

However, part of me remained cynical that he would outlive me. As they say, the good die young, and, well…

Now I have to concern myself with things like what cremation jewelry he will go in or be part of, and those are uncomfortable thoughts. I’m already set to receive a cremation necklace that has some of his ashes in it that I picked out for my oldest son whenever his aunt gets around to filling it or having it filled and sent back to me. She has all the time in the world. I don’t want to stress her out or cause her any sort of distress here.

I’m not quite sure what I’ve posted where or who I’ve told what, as I’ve had to have a lot of different conversations with a lot of different people about… the event that I know I mentioned in here soon after I found out that it had actually happened. You know, when I found out and was given proof that my oldest son’s father had died. (This happened over a series of days, as I was given proof of what had happened from people one day, and then businesses, companies… what do you call them?… the next. And as I tried to reach out to more people, particularly more of his family members, I found out more about it in some cases.)

All of Monster’s “father”‘s family members who have requested, or otherwise made it clear, that they would like a copy of the autopsy have been turned down for various, conflicting reasons, almost all of whom owe up to the fact that Kentucky is being Kentucky. Under normal circumstances I’m told that I would be able to request it for my son’s medical records and peace of mind, seeing as how my son was a minor when this happened and is still a minor, but I’ve been told from one agency that I can’t do so because we’re out of state and another agency that I can’t do so because his developmentally and intellectually disabled son is his next of kin (even though the morgue tried as hard as they could to get a hold of me and my father in the days that followed this, as apparently I had been made his next of kin by him in recent years? that I had been someone he wanted to be able to make decisions on his behalf if ever such a person were needed, even though I hadn’t heard from him since 2007 nor laid eyes on him since late 2010? early 2011? all of this is confusing).

His younger sister, who became his acting “next of kin” when his mother refused, can’t request autopsy records because of the out-of-state thing. Neither can his older sister for reasons that aresimilar to those.

I’ve attempted to contact out to my state’s Legal Aid to see if they can help me navigate through this.

State senators in both states can not, as “those senators can only act in behalf of federal cases”, I’m told.

I have almost everything that I think I’ll ever need on hand for my oldest son’s “father” (term used such as it is, for new people to my blog, because the last time he saw my son was when he was four months old and my son is now seventeen years old). I have the incident report for the accident that took his life, and I have a copy of the death certificate here at my home since I’m sure I’ll be needing that in place of our child’s custody order. There’s no one to share custody with if he’s gone. In our case, it wasn’t really sharing custody though… I was granted sole custody and he was denied access, and then that was made permanent in 2014 due to an escalation of his behavior that can only be described as severe, threatening to bring a gun into the child support office due to wage garnishment upon realizing that his wages had in fact been garnished. So the only thing that the now-defunct custody order proves is that his “parental rights”, such as they were, had not been terminated, but his presence on my child’s birth certificate proves that. He was permanently denied access to my child and could not reach out to contact my child for any reason, was permanently prohibited from contacting me (if he needed to make contact “about our child”, he was to contact a member of my family as he was not permitted to contact me), and had almost no decision-making authority over my child absent what I’m sure must normally come part and parcel with being on a child’s birth certificate and “having parental rights”. One thing in particular to note is that he has never had the ability to consent to my child’s medical care. This came from repeated threats to “drop my child from (his medical insurance)”.

I continue to be at peace with the fact that he is gone, because we will never be stalked or abused again. But I would not wish his manner of death on anyone, knowing that he was instantaneously killed when his bicycle was struck by a motor vehicle. I would also not wish his age of death on anyone knowing that he died at age thirty-seven, and I am now certifiably older than him. So many of his family members wanted him to “turn his shit around”, and although I can see why they would want that, for my son’s sake I had stopped hoping for it almost a year after I was ordered sole custody. He’d made it clear he wasn’t going to.