I don’t think I should go into too many details here, but suffice it to say it’s around the project my friend and I undertook to get an urn niche for our little old lady dancer friend who died in Jan. We fundraised the money to buy the niche and pay funeral expenses - costs that were inexplicably not provided for by her family - with the intention of having a gathering in two weeks to celebrate her life (mostly among swing dancers, but of course family is invited). Sounds lovely, right?
Well. Of course where grieving family are involved nothing can ever go smoothly. And the friend I undertook to do this with is notoriously pushy and a control freak who often rubs people the wrong way. So everything just blew up. The one family member we’ve been collaborating with blindsided us by wanting to make our swing dance community gathering also about her brother who nobody knew, who she somehow had money to buy a niche for, and we objected on the terms that it wouldn’t look right to have all these people who paid for the lady’s niche come in and feel like their money went to pay for this other random person’s funeral. We suggested having a family service first and then a community service later only for the lady - she objected. We involved the owner of the cemetery, who was always gushing over us saying how wonderful we are for doing this, and who I started taking yoga from last week, hoping he and/or our contact there could help. The family member did finally agree to two services but we were trying to nail down details and make sure our portion would really be just for our person and no one else, in a flurry of emails and calls. Somehow the owner saw the emails and became convinced we were “excluding family” (we never said this and in fact said the exact opposite on numerous occasions), decided we were the devil, and told us so in no uncertain terms. He got into an ugly shouting match over the phone with my friend in which he told her she was a horrible person, then emailed us both about how cruel we were and said if we don’t agree to the family’s terms right now he’s not only going to cancel the lady’s niche and make a statement to our donors how awful we are, but also kick us out of our own niches that we bought for ourselves. He had no interest in hearing our side of the story or letting us correct him that we never had any intention of excluding any family, quite the opposite.
His extreme overreaction and abuse to us made me so mad that my voice is hoarse from yelling about it to various friends. I got four hours’ sleep. Bizarrely, my friend, who was the brunt of all this, wants to just concede to everything and carry on. I agree we need to concede, but for everyone’s peace of mind I think we need to just let the family take over completely, fuck the community part (that can happen at my event in September anyway), and remove ourselves entirely because it’s clear we’re not wanted and we’ve just upset everyone, so we need to just scrap our plans and go away.
Never mind the fact that we did all of this and made it possible, never mind the fact that if not for us she’d just be in a box in someone’s closet, never mind the fact that this family member insisted on a “do resuscitate” notice for this lady against everyone’s wishes and the caretakers had to sit by helplessly watching this lady suffer for months when she just wanted to go, and told us so, repeatedly. But no, we’re the cruel ones. Cool cool.
The cemetery people repeated over and over how family is first and their obligation is to them, not us, and I agree, because legally that’s how it is. But in this, and many cases, I say fuck family. They didn’t give a shit enough to make any plans for her at all, kept her suffering alive against her will, and are trying to piggyback onto our hard work and money raising by throwing another person into the mix. Fuck family. For real. We’re clearly the only people looking out for her.
And fuck this guy for assassinating our character like that. I’m furious. I am considering canceling my niche anyway just because I don’t want to give them my money, but I’m going to wait and see what happens next. I don’t think we should proceed with our part of the celebration and I don’t want any part of it going forward. We can celebrate her later on our own terms.
It’s truly amazing how ugly things can get and how quickly things can spiral out of control. I know if it had just been me in charge none of this would have happened - I’m much better at managing difficult people than my friend is. But the combination of her volatile nature and this tricky situation just blew up and unfortunately here we are with this ugly mess on our hands. Life really sucks sometimes.
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