It’s been fun setting up the survivor’s benefits that my oldest son is due from his father’s death, but the fact that I can never expect him to at least try to reach out to our son because he is dead is becoming… more and more of a thing. I found out that my application for benefits for him had been approved and got the award letter that comes with it before I had even been sent a copy of the information that I provided Social Security with, which wasn’t even the most surprising part. The surprising part of all of this is the fact that my son is due to get $933 a month off of the work record that someone else had, that we didn’t even know about — almost all of his family members, not to mention so many of his childhood friends, thought that his criminal record would have precluded my son even being eligible for survivor’s benefits in the first place, let alone at this amount. And I don’t think any of us will know the kinds of jobs that he must have held in the years and months leading up to his death, although it’s become increasingly more apparent to me that any place of work he must have had would have had to figure out his death the hard way, because none of us knew his current address, his place of work, even the types of jobs he was working. The fact he died was a surprise.

There’s just so much that we didn’t know about him that we won’t ever know about him. I’m fine with that.