The night we met Burke & Hare

[robling_t]

unhipster commented to a recent post on her incredulity at the notion that the hospital lost my father's body, and the story's long enough to merit a post of its own, so here you are:

My father died more or less unexpectedly of a stroke in 1998, and, as usual for him, hadn't ever made any arrangements for the eventuality of his death (besides filling out a Power of Attorney form which we later somehow managed to leave in the seatback-pouch of a car when we traded it in, but that's another long story... which he also thought was hilarious, fortunately). While Mum and I were in one part of the hospital trying to have his body donated to science (since everyone concerned was A) too broke for a funeral and B)not exactly wanting to get dragged into having to deal with him even the one last time, not to mention that we felt that since he'd been on the bloodthinners for some years he could at least be doing somebody somewhere some good by becoming a data-point in some study), the workers in the back of the hospital, having apparently marked him down as 'indigent' (more or less technically true, as it happened, but still a clerical snafu to do it), were making their own arrangements to turn over the 'unclaimed' body for embalming practice. [!] (But I suppose it could have been worse...) And since this spoiled the research value of the remains, the hospital decided to make good by offering to have him cremated. Which would have been fine, again, with everyone concerned, so long as none of us had to foot the bill for him... but then the outfit that the hospital sent the remains to for the work reported back that, um, well, yes, that guy you sent over, that you already were having the problem about? Seems nobody here's quite sure just what we did with the ashes...

We did consider suing, but in the end nobody really had the money to pursue the matter, and as Mum put it at the time, it wasn't really worth the continued emotional investment either. I find that I'm still madder about it in the abstract that it shouldn't have happened to a dog than because it happened to my father in particular, so it was probably just as well to have let it drop. (I do note that the hospital in question seems to have closed since then, so maybe they were making a habit of these little 'foulups'...) And no, the ashes never did turn up, so far as I know. If they had, or did, I think we decided to leave matters in the hands of his secretary, who was the only person who seemed more than even mildly interested in how any of it came out and that only because he'd lost his job.


Some background is probably in order, lest I seem overly cavalier in relating all of this: my parents split up when I was 3, with myself their only Issue, and for all intents and purposes that was the end of any sort of Meaningful Relationship I would ever have with my father -- not, I gather, that he'd been doing much of anything to make it at all Meaningful while they were still together. Once I decided, aged 5, that neither of us were really getting much out of visitations, he made little effort to keep up; I saw him maybe once or twice a year, then less, and finally stopped speaking to him altogether when I was in college because there didn't seem to be any point in even trying. (It took him two years to notice.) I did eventually reconcile with him a little, enough to end up living in his spare bedroom for what would turn out to be the last year of his life, and I suppose it was fortunate that I had that time with him, because unlike many children of early divorce I'm not left wondering if Mum's account of things was a trifle one-sided; I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my father really was too self-centered to have been any sort of proper parent to me, and I can let it rest with a clear conscience. And, um, Mum just walked in, so I'll have to continue elaborating on this at another time... :)