Working while blue

Last week I made a vow to meet everyone's responses to monshu's death with a spirit of generosity and I've done a pretty good job of keeping it. Not yesterday, however. Near lunchtime I suspected La Vache was making an attempt to wish me sympathy so I spent the rest of the day dodging her. At Chicago, she basically tried to get the Old Man fired, encouraging a disgruntled employee to bring a complaint against him and just generally being a dick to him (and later me, when we started associating). I'm sure he'd forgiven her for this--he was letting go of all his old grievances as he felt death approaching--but I'm not him and I couldn't imagine hearing her offer condolences without saying something cutting like "One thing I've always admired about you is your chutzpah" or even just a nonplussed "Really?"

So I fled and ended up at another bank informing another indifferent functionary about his death. But where Friday's employee covered up his indifference with good customer service, Monday's was careless and inept, drawing increasingly curt responses and even admonitions from me. I think it's the first time someone has offered me a business card and I made no show of taking it in order to be polite. (For all I know, it's still lying their on his desk where he dropped it.) There was a loud, cranky old man in the neighbouring cubicle and I just wanted to get the hell out of there.

Fortunately, bunj is in my corner. Despite a Bavarian Totencold, he and e. stopped by in the evening to pick up a death certificate so he could file the will first thing today. He tried going to a branch of bank #1 to wind things up, but they wanted not only the affidavit and the certificate but also a copy of the will and he didn't have one with him. I don't know why I'm so impatient. There's plenty of money in the joint account to handle known expenses for the coming month it will take to have the assets transferred to me but it's just a messy state of affairs having no control over his funds and I don't like it.

I made the wrong call by deciding I didn't need any lorazepam to fall asleep last night so I stumbled through today and blew off my afternoon meeting. I guess I should be consuming the slack people are extending me at work while it lasts. So far, I've been resisting the urge to respond to the umpteenth expression of sympathy with a novel response like a cheery "All's well that ends well!" I guess it helps that today I heard mostly from people who I have nothing against and who really have been through some shit so there's a weight to their words I don't find in everyone's. Always is interesting, btw, who comes through in these moments and who doesn't. I have a growing stack of condolence cards on my desk now and they're nearly all from colleagues I wouldn't have expected.