[PUBLIC] Gail Virginia Hollaway Hartley (3/7/1930 - 1/14/2011)
On Friday morning, my dad's mother Gail passed away at the assisted living community in which she was living. She would have been 81 years old in a couple of months. Her funeral is going to be at Evans Funeral Service tomorrow afternoon at 2pm and then we'll be having the burial at Zack's Fork Baptist Church Cemetery later that day. Her online memorial/obituary is here. I know I have a few IRL people on my list that knew her, so you can leave a condolence there. I'm going to leave this public just for that.
The whole process has been hard because she only had a $2000 life insurance policy. Dad's brother has helped chip in, but the rest of the family hasn't bothered lifting a finger. Well, except to point it at my aunt Leasa (who inherited the house, which isn't worth anything) and say that she should fit the bill (even though she's disabled and doesn't have a dime to her name). Dad had to borrow $800 to go with what Larry was going to pay and the $2000 life insurance policy. One of my aunts threw a fit over having a steel vault (which you don't have to have, but she thinks everyone needs to have a steel vault so that the dirt won't collapse the casket), but we can't afford to pay $600 more, so she's going to be buying it. She's butthurt over that and won't talk to dad now. On Tuesday dad is going to try to get some money out of his 401k so that we can buy her a gravestone.
It's been really hard on dad. Like really hard. He was the one they called when it happened. They called while he was at work and wouldn't tell him why they needed him to come there. She had just died when he got there. She was still in the floor where they had to do CPR on her. They had put a blanket on her, but hadn't cleaned her up or anything. He said her mouth was gaping open and she wasn't wearing her teeth. He's beating himself up over it because the day before when he visited her, he knew something was wrong. She had been gaining a lot of fluid the last few weeks. They had started weighing her everyday to try to figure out how much she was gaining daily. The only thing they gave her to try to help the fluid gain was Lasix (Furosemide) (which just causes you to pee a lot and it's really bad for your kidneys and if they were already failing, that just helped her along). He's so sad and I hate being around when he starts talking about her because he starts crying. It's hard to get it through to him that if he had taken her home that she would have died anyway and that she probably wouldn't have been found until a day or two later. At least someone tried to save her and they found her when it happened. And honestly, it would have happened before now if she hadn't have moved there because she wasn't eating or taking her medicines like she should have. The only way she could have lived is if she was put on dialysis, which she would have refused. It's just really hard and then with all the family fighting over who should pay and shit, it's just ridiculous. The woman has 5 daughters, 2 sons, 17 grandchildren, 24 great-grandchildren, and 5 great-great-grandchildren, so if all of us just pitched in like $40, we could pay for the damn thing with the life insurance policy. BUT NO, everyone is just a bickering bunch of assholes with no compassion at all. And the whole bill is left to two children and we don't think she'll have any pallbearers, even with 50-something children-grandchildren-great-grandchildren-great-great-grandchildren.