Obituaries
My dad forwarded me a text shortly after Tita died: '“Beware of spam callers asking for her financial information. I answered the phone and got suspicious after they started asking for my SSN. Looked them up and they are scammers posing as debt collectors.” Tita passed away after battling pancreatic cancer for a year and a half. During that time, she traveled and maintained her signature indignation at almost everything. She thought she knew better than everyone, and I’m not wholly convinced she didn’t, except about the “charity missions” whose mountains of thank you medallions, certificates, and notepads were stacked around her apartment. For all my agnosticism, I admire her faith, if not in other people than in God. I wonder, too, if she anticipated the fuss that her death would elicit within our family and the eyes of the state when I caught her waving off the treasures and knick knacks hoarded in her curio cabinets. Burn it all, she scoffed in the weeks before she died.
I have since accumulated various furnishings of hers for the new apartment my partner and I moved into. Blankets and plates and dish towels and knives and a rice container and fridge magnets and her lipstick plant. She has given me a diamond cross necklace and gold hoops. I feel opportunistic in my relief at not having to buy any of it. I feel cowardly for allowing this passing down of things to stand in for our relationship rather than parsing it out more deeply.
The truth is we didn’t talk very much. Growing up, she had a key to our house and came and went as she pleased. In grade school, she took me to the mall to scour the department store clearance racks. She tutted at my long, dirty fingernails. She called other drivers dingbats! She pushed food at me, like all my Titas and Lolas do. I didn’t include any of this in the notice my dad and his siblings had asked me to write. Like all standard obituaries, I had padded hers with platitudes about Catholic devotion and generosity and working hard for a living.
I wonder if that was the notice the scammers had read before calling, if they had sized up her surviving nephews and nieces (but no spouse or children) and thought, she’s probably got money. The truth is likely much more inane, some ping on a system tracking death notices. I prefer to believe that someone somewhere thought Tita was worthy of their attention, that she had done well enough for herself to amass some savings, and had a family who’d fall for a scheme in the fog of their grief. We haven’t, but the fog has persisted, too.
First published in September 2020. Revised in February 2022. Re-revised in February 2023.