postmortem thoughts

[calimac]

1. It's true I accumulate a lot of stuff of no interest to anyone but me. But here's two things I don't keep:
i) old grocery/sundry shopping receipts after the credit bill has come
ii) expired credit cards

2. If you phone up Medicare, and the robotic voice asks you to state the reason for your call, and you reply, "Death of beneficiary," the robotic voice will express its condolences for your loss. I don't know whether to be touched or creeped out.

3. I apologize if this one creeps you out, but I found on the day that spending an hour in a nursing facility bedroom with a dead body that had been dear to me, and only a hospice volunteer for company, waiting for the van to come (to borrow a phrase), did not bother me. But 20 minutes of listening to the television of the patient in the other half of the room emit an infomercial for carpet cleaner was more than I could bear.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

WE lost my MiL a couple of years back and I get the impression these things are better handled here. Perhaps the NHS factor again?

That condolence stuff really is creepy.......

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What things being better handled are you referring to? The hour wait, or having to listen to the infomercial? The hour wait was because the mortuary we chose was an hour away, and we chose it because it was the nearest Jewish one. I've had enough experience in the past with non-Jewish mortuaries that I wasn't going to do that again.

As for the infomercial, does the NHS have only private, not semi-private rooms in its hospitals? If there are no infomercials on British television (lucky you if there aren't), that's not the NHS's doing.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I mesnt more the lack of having to deal with agencies like medicare. There aren't the screeds of form filling that have to be dealt with at entirely the wrong moment.

There is the choice of non commercial TV here. The NHS does provide private rooms for the seriously/terminally ill.

Infomercials are rare on UK TV thnkfully.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Contacting Medicare was simply done, and but a thimbleful of the dealings I've had to do that I wouldn't trust the NHS with even if they offered those services: cancelling credit cards and subscriptions, hiring an estate liquidator, finding the value of her car and her stocks, and so on, and those are just the ones requiring interaction with an agency.

By contrast, things like filling out the death certificate, getting the body properly taken care of, and arranging for the actual burial were real easy. The hospice and the mortician did all of that for us.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

We took the view with all the bits you mention that that is what we were paying lawyers for and to be fair, they did a pretty good job.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Lawyers charge enough as it is for the bits that only lawyers can do. No point in paying them even more to do things we can do, and which we know more about the details of than they do, so we'd have to spend the same time explaining the details to them that we could otherwise spend actually doing them.

In fact the lawyers specifically told me to check the valuations myself. Even they thought it would be more than silly for them to do it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Here's an example of why I'm not paying lawyers to do this: it turns out that determining the value of a car requires knowing a lot more about exactly what model (I'm talking far more detail than the "year x, make and model, 4-door sedan" level) and what equipment and accessories it has, than I knew - after all, it wasn't my car - or that was recorded in any of the documentation, even the sales contract. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with people from the dealer getting that information found and recorded. I'm not paying lawyers lawyerly rates to do that.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I have to say I'm ambivalent about #2. Condolences from a robotic voice is kind of creepy, yet it does seem thoughtful of the people who set up the system that they felt there should be some sort of acknowledgement that "Death of beneficiary" isn't just a run of the mill answer.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I didn't mind being alone with my dead father at first, but after ten minutes or so it was too much .

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

You have my total sympathy. When your life has been upset--and the death of one's parent is always an upset--the sheer mundane inanity of things like the infomercial can indeed be irritating out of all proportion.