Well this month was terrible

Things have been hectic for me this year and it's noticeably put a dent in my output when it comes to Akagi^2.  While I'm between jobs as a software engineer, I agreed to take a part-time position as maintenance for a community of duplexes that my current apartment complex management also happens to manage.  This works out for me because I already have all the tools needed for the job, I know plumbing/HVAC/etc, and I have some decent craftsman skills.  Just four hours a day, and I'm pretty much my own boss, and I even get my own area to put my all my saws/tools so I can work in my own stuff. Sweet.

I took this position in late June, and a little over a month later around the beginning of August, I certainly wasn't expecting the call I got around midnight from my boss.  Her niece happened to live at the duplexes in question and she was complaining about a terrible smell emanating from her adjacent neighbor's home. I drove over to inspect.

This old fellow lived alone and that's why it took so long for anyone to find what became of him. I immediately contact the county sheriff, and while they were confirming this fellow was dead along with contacting the coroner, I went over to the duplex office to open his file to find out who his next of kin is. 

Turns out he didn't list any. The only other person in his life was his girlfriend (who was around his same age, in their 70's) who lived with him until February of this year when she had simply expired in the same home and he came home to find her. So, I looked through the file for the paperwork listing _her_ next of kin. 

She didn't list any. 

So, the next morning, I arrived with my industrial-grade ionizer (one of the smartest purchases I ever made) and set it to running in the house. While in there, I managed to locate a few operational cell phones, so I grabbed them thinking I could find any family in the contacts so I could inform them of the death. When I was on my way back out of the door, I noticed a medium-sized parcel box near the door that had never been opened. It was addressed to the recently deceased resident, and the shipping date on the box was mid-March of this year, and there was a big sticker on the side that said REMAINS. He shipped his deceased girlfriend all the way to Arizona and had her cremated there and the remains shipped back here. 

Well, shit. Okay. So, I go back to the duplex office to go through the contacts of all the phones I found, only to discover that there were no contacts in any of the phones. 

The deceased had turned the second bedroom of his duplex into a sort of home office, so I returned there and went through the paperwork sitting on the desk.  This is when I discovered paperwork from the local Republican headquarters, to which he was a member to.  Reading through that paperwork, I discovered that he was one of the more prominent Republicans in this area. That's when I noticed the framed pictures of himself and John McCain and Mike Pence. This is kind of strange, considering where he lived.  I've known prominent Republicans and Democrats from where I grew up, and all of them lived either upper middle class or high class lifestyles. They were very family-oriented (some for the sake of appearances I am sure) and lived pretty well. The duplexes I was working at were a nice little neighborhood, but are priced at something that the lowest of the lower middle class could afford. 

But that wasn't the strangest part. The deceased was also a retired Navy O-5. A commander. (I swear none of this is the buildup to a tasteless joke or anything.) A retired US Navy commander who, as far as I know, didn't have any family or a will. He should have been living better than this. His vehicle was a rusted-out Dodge minivan in the garage (and when I mean rusted-out, I mean rusted-out. 250,000+ miles.) When I started to clean out his kitchen later that day, the numerous empty pint bottles of whiskey and gin explained how he died. He drank himself to death. 

So, I call the local Republican HQ that afternoon and informed them of his death. I told them the reason I was calling was because I was trying to find out if there is any next of kin who can come and get the things of his they want to keep. The HQ told me that he did indeed have a daughter, but they didn't know where she lived. They would use their networking skills to find out what they could. They also informed me that the girlfriend he lived with was a textbook harridan who controlled his life to such a degree that it estranged him from his daughter for over twenty years. This wasn't the first time a third party told me something like this.  In fact, I never talked to anyone who had a kind word to say about her.  Turns out, she was even worse than that. 

Going through other paperwork and from some awards from the VA on the wall, it appeared the deceased girlfriend was an Army veteran. Some of these awards were from the VA and several were from the large veteran's cemetery here, where she served as one of its council members for several years. She was all over the veteran's community here, so _why_ in the world was she shipped off to Arizona to be cremated and her ashes returned, when the VA would have done this for free, here?  Why are her ashes sitting in a box in this man's cheap duplex, as opposed to be interred at the veteran's cemetery here? I drove to the cemetery to talk to the staff there, but none of them could remember this woman. They also needed her DD-214 before they could accept her remains to be interred. Alright.

That evening, I received a call from the Chicago area.  It was the deceased commander's daughter. She was informed that her father passed away, but she didn't know how, and she asked me. It was painful, but I told her the truth.  She took it pretty well, and said that she would be driving in on that coming Saturday to claim her father's things. She also answered a great deal of the questions I had about what was going on here.  

The woman he was living with was indeed a harridan. She was also a liar, and a scam artist. She has a long police record. She not only estranged the deceased commander from his family for over 20 years, she was completely estranged from _her_ entire family. She frequently stole money and tried to frame others for it, and she was frequently kicked out of local organizations that she had joined (the Eagles, the local vet cemetery council, etc.) She even went so far as to tell the daughter to just forget about ever expecting any of her father's things whenever he passes away (which is really fucking funny how THAT turned out.)

I showed up to the duplex that saturday morning and met the daughter (a very kind and lovely woman), and gave her the keys to the place. Told her to take her time.  I asked her that if she _does_ find that woman's DD-214, to please let me know. She may have been an awful woman, but if she _did_ serve honorably, it's my responsibility as a fellow veteran to see that her remains are properly interred.  That's when the daughter informed me of the ugly truth: The commander's girlfriend never served a day in her life. She lied about her enlistment. And sure enough, in the paperwork left over, there was no DD-214 to be found; and what's more, before the commander died, he did a FOIA to retrieve this document which he needed for the VA to cremate her remains and inter her here. The archives located her signed oath of enlistment from 1970, but that's the only military documentation they had of her. She went to MEPS and did the oath, but when it came to load up the bus and move out to boot camp, she was nowhere to be found. He didn't learn the truth of this one of many lies of hers until after she died.  That's why he shipped her off to Arizona and paid for her to be cremated there; the rest of her family lived that way but none of them wanted her remains so they returned them to him. This is how deeply everyone else despised this woman.

The next morning the daughter called me and again thanked me for ensuring I contacted her so she could claim her father's belongings, and as a thank-you, she left an envelope in the house and told me where to find it.  It contained $302 cash (the additional $2 was in the form of a $2 bill.) She cleared out everything of her father's that she wanted -- his laptop, his awards, his signed sports memorabilia, his Navy decorations and the like. Everything left was all of the girlfriend's ratty old clothing, her ill-gotten awards from the VA, and just plain junk. I kept some of his military records that were left, including his FOIA requests and some of his original orders and correspondence from his time in the Navy.  Aside from this, it's as if he never existed.  Despite him frequently appearing in the local newspaper for the past few decades for his efforts to support local veterans, there was no obituary here or in Chicago. 

She left behind an old oak cabinet, which was definitely pre-WWII, so I claimed it and am currently in the process of restoring and refinishing it. The girlfriend's remains were also still there, but my boss was able to contact another side of that woman's estranged family who were, thankfully, willing to take the remains and do whatever you do with someone's ashes. She also left behind what was left of his unopened liquor and wine collection, which I also claimed. There were a bunch of unopened packs of Marlboros that I gave to a guy I frequently see picking butts out of public cigarette ashtrays. I'm still turning over (cleaning) the duplex. I painted the duplex's walls last week and cleared out the last of the tupperware that his girlfriend so maniacally hoarded.

Anyway, this was my extremely strange August. I'm getting back to work on Akagi^2 as we speak.  Thanks for remaining my patrons.  Akagi-chan's story is about to kick in a higher gear after I finish this current storyline, which was entirely for fun.  It started whenever I thought about all the similarities between Warspite and Liz, and Jaime and Cersei; and how offended the former would justifiably be by the comparison. 

Anyway, back to work. There's less than a month of summer left, so don't waste it.