A night or so ago, I received a surprise phone call from our chiropodist who wished to make the following request. A near neighbour was in contact with an old lady whose husband had died and she was in receipt of all kinds of medicines and dressings and did not know how to dispose of them. I gave the chiropodist my telephone number and the lady then contacted me so that I cold tell her about the way in which I disposed of all our excess medical supplies to aid the Ukraine. I passed on the email contact that I had and I trust that my chiropodist’s neighbour will manage to make contact with the Ukrainian lady so that even more unwanted medicines can flow to a place where they are needed and appreciated. I have told quite a few people now how we managed to dispose of these medications and how happy it made me feel (and probably Meg as well if she can observe from a better place). Yesterday morning, my son and I had allocated ourselves the time and space to utilise the government ‘Tell Us Once’ service whereby all government departments with which an individual mainly has had transactions are informed about their death. A special reference number was given to us by the Registrar when Meg’s death was registered and this is the key that starts to unlock the process. In practice my son and I found the site to be well designed and easy to navigate but we did appreciate that ‘two eyes are better than one’ when it comes to supplying critical credentials. Meg did not have a driving licence but the two key numbers were her National Insurance number and her Passport number. The whole process was completed in about 20 minutes and we were pleased that that this went without a hitch. I walked down to town to collect my newspaper and the staff at Waitrose let me have a bottle of cordial for free as well as giving me a lemon drizzle cake for my elevenses and yet another bunch of flowers. The staff at Waitrose have been overwhelmingly kind and sympathetic to me and I am so appreciative of all of them. Last week when our domestic help was here, she and my son did a sterling job in clearing out all of the impedimenta associated with a bedroom downstairs and so the task this week was to give the carpet a through hoovering and to restore the furniture to the position that it used to occupy so that we now have now reclaimed all of our Main lounge. It is true that a coffee table-top of clutter has been left for me to process but this will be a labour of love and I will set to it with a vengeance.
When we held our 50th wedding anniversary celebrations, these were split into three so that my family in Yorkshire could attend one, family and friends in the Midlands attend the second and finally our Spanish friends and some cousins and friends to attend the third held in Spain. I have a videoclip of Meg making an off-the-cuff speech to our family in Yorkshire in September, 2017 and most of the clip is Meg speaking although I did join in with some observations about how proud I was of Meg (as well as some jokes) towards the end. When I was up during the night, I constructed a short and memorable link to the website where this videoclip is located and thus I was able to show it to our domestic help whilst she was having her mid-morning coffee. This, of course, was Meg at her absolute best speaking without notes and without hesitations and with a clear memory before the cruel manifestations of the dementia were to appear a year or so later. I wanted our domestic help to have a wonderful memory of Meg at her most fluent and most typical and we were both so very pleased that we could enjoy this videoclip together. There ere various little games and pastimes I had bought for Meg which I hoped (in vain) that she could enjoy but our domestic help was pleased that she could utilise them on the residential home in which she worked. After our domestic help and son had departed, I did not feel particularly hungry so wondered if I could squeeze in a visit to the Bank in order to close down Meg’s account. This flying visit proved fruitless as I needed to see some personnel who were at lunch and it would, in any case, take some time. So I returned home and awaited the arrival of our hairdresser who, of course, only has me to process. Her own brother had died a few months ago and she is busy disposing of unwanted effects and trying to sell his flat so we empathised with each other that we were both fully cognisant of what we were going through with the processes that take place after a bereavement.
When I eventually got to our bank for the second time that day, the person who saw me could not have been more sympathetic or kindly. For a start she had two close kin who had dementia and her own husband had died, very quickly, of throat cancer. The bank official had managed to locate a really old savings account which was almost 30 years old and which we had totally forgotten about with £28 in it. This was ‘rescued’ and then the other trivial amount of money in Meg’s main account will make its way over eventually into our joint account whilst Meg’s individual account will be closed down. I had a briefcase full of documentation but all that was necessary was a death certificate (which was photocopied and then handed back to me) and my own ID (driving licence, passport) The procedures seemed quite thorough and meticulous with lots of checking along the way and I was in the bank for an 1hr and 20 minutes. But as I walked back to the car, I realised that Meg, in the eyes of the state, does not officially ‘exist’ anymore as this morning’s and this afternoon’s procedures will have closed down all of Meg’s financial dealings with the state (and the bank) On the way home, I spotted my Irish friend doing some gardening so I gave him a quick update on all of our news to date.