The post office was supposed to deliver my son’s necklace, the one that has his dead father’s ashes in it, lied, and said that there was no authorized recipient home. This was bullshit, and I’m about to get into why.

I made a nice, wonderful call to… I’m guessing the federal agency that’s supposed to deal with this, and I explain that this is not the first time my mailman has not delivered packages with guaranteed delivery dates on time, but that it was profoundly annoying because this parcel has my son’s necklace in it (you know, the one with his father’s ashes), and a baggie with some more ashes in it because I expressed interest in getting a ring made for myself and getting a tattoo with his ashes infused in it. The representative that I spoke to was nice enough to file a complaint against the mailman because this should never have happened, and I get to go down to the post office downtown (the “main post office”) and pick up the parcel that was supposed to be delivered to my house today. Nothing was left on my front door about a missed package, and nothing was left in my mailbox about a missed package. Nothing. The mailman scanned the parcel and claimed that there was no one available to sign for it, which was a lie because two adults in my home were home at the time the rest of the mail was deposited in our mailbox. And given that this has happened more than once, I honestly hope that he loses his job for it. I don’t want to keep dealing with “missed packages”.

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.