They called me the one who handled it. For twenty years, I mistook that for love. My name is Thea Samrall, and in sixteen years I have directed nearly two thousand funerals in West Alabama. I have stood in rooms where the worst thing that will ever happen to a family has already happened, and I have kept my voice level.
On a Wednesday in September at 5:51 in the evening, my mother left me a voicemail. I was in the arrangement office of our Birmingham chapel with my sleeves rolled to the elbow and a folder of death certificates in front of me. “You’re out, Thea,” she said. “Don’t bury me.
Your brother will. The sign comes down today. ” Then she hung up. She believed my $312,000 was already spent and gone.
She believed I would cry about it and then by Friday apologize. She had forgotten what my grandmother put in writing in the summer of 2014. She had forgotten that nothing living could change one word of it. Summer Funeral Home opened on Prairie Avenue in Utah, Alabama, in 1954.
My grandfather Roy poured the front steps himself. My grandmother ordered the pews, the hymnals, and the green canopy that still goes up over the graves at Antioch Chapel. Green County had 16,000 people then and two funeral homes. Now it has fewer people and one, and the one is ours.
There is a thing people outside the Black Belt do not understand. In a county like ours, the question of who buried your mother is not small talk. It is the whole ledger of a family’s standing. It tells you who showed up, who paid, who was trusted with the worst night of your life.
For 71 years, in most of the houses between Boligee and Forkland, the answer has been the same. Summers did it. My grandmother trained me. I started riding along with her when I was 12 on Saturday mornings in a 1989 Cadillac with a bench seat and no working radio.
She let me carry the flower stands. She let me hold the register book. She taught me how to set a casket on a church truck. And she said the same six words every single time until they stopped being instruction and became a rule I lived by: “Whatever else happens, you carry them level.
”
She meant do not tip it. She meant do not hurry. She meant the family is watching your hands and your hands are the only sermon they will remember. I did not know then that she meant more than that.
I got my license in 2010. I hold both of them, funeral director and embalmer, from the Alabama Board of Funeral Service. In 2016, my grandmother sold me the business, not gave. She wrote a note for $340,000 at $2,400 a month.
She told me a thing given is a thing that can be taken back, and she wanted me to own what I had earned in a way nobody could argue with later. She was right about that. She was right about most things. My mother, Glenda Samrall, is 64.
She has never held a license. She does not go in the prep room, and she has never once sat with a family at 2 in the morning while they decide whether to open the casket. What she does is arrive at the visitation at 6 in a good dress, touch three people on the elbow, say something warm, and leave by 7. She has a memory for names that I would trade a finger for.
My brother Colby is 34. He started mortuary school in Atlanta in 2013 and left in the second semester because the anatomy course was, in his words, not what I signed up for. He came home and my mother invented a job for him. He was our family service counselor, then our director of community relations, then our grief care coordinator.
He has business cards for all three. He has never filed a death certificate. My sister Cecile is 24. She answers the phone at the Utah Chapel, and she is good at it because she is kind and she does not talk over people who are crying.
And me. I was the one who handled it. Let me tell you what that meant with numbers, because numbers are how I tell the truth. In 2011, I paid $4,800 for the down payment on Colby’s first truck because my mother said he could not go see families in a car with a cracked windshield.
He never went to see a family in it. He hauled a boat with it. Between 2016 and 2019, the firm ran short on payroll nine times. Always in January, always after a slow December.
Nine times I moved money from my personal savings into the company account so that Emmitt Ruffin, who has driven our lead car since 1994, would not have a check bounce. The total was $61,000. Nobody ever asked me to pay it back. Nobody ever mentioned it again.
In 2019, when my grandmother had her stroke, I drove from Birmingham to the hospital in Tuscaloosa 31 nights in a row after work. My mother came on Sundays. She brought magazines. She left before the shift change because that was when the hard conversations happened.
In 2022, a three-vehicle wreck on Highway 43 took a father and his daughter two days before Christmas. I worked Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. My family was in Gulf Shores in a rental with a hot tub. My mother texted me a picture of the sunset and the words, “We miss you.
Somebody has to hold down the fort. ”
That was the arrangement. Somebody always did. At the family’s Iron Bowl party in 2023, with 30 people in her den and the game on two televisions, someone asked what exactly Colby did at the funeral home.
My mother laughed and put her hand flat on his back. “Thea handles the bodies,” she said. “Colby handles the people. ”
Nobody corrected her.
I did not correct her either. I went and refilled the ice. I want to be fair to my mother, because being fair is the only thing that separates what I did from what she did. In the summer of 1993, there was a house fire out past the Boligee cutoff.
A woman named Odessa Pruit lost her husband and her mother-in-law in one night. I was 6 years old, in the back of the chapel, supposed to be asleep on a pallet of quilts. I watched my mother, then 32, sit on the floor of the family room with Miss Odessa’s head in her lap for four hours. She made egg salad sandwiches at 3 in the morning and cut the crusts off because Miss Odessa’s grandbaby would not eat them otherwise.
She did not check her watch once. She was good at this once. That is the part that took me the longest to forgive and the part that made forgiving her impossible. Somewhere between 1993 and now, she decided the work was beneath her and the standing was owed to her.
She wanted the name without the 2 in the morning. Now, two things you need to know before that voicemail. The first is my grandmother’s trust. In June 2014, Eda Summerall drove herself to Birmingham and sat down with a lawyer named Lamar Whitfield.
She created the Eda L. Summer Family Trust. She put in the timberland, 214 acres off County Road 20. She put in the chapel buildings.
She put in a bond account she had been feeding since 1971. She named herself as trustee because it was her money and she was not done deciding things. She named me as her successor trustee. She did not name me as a beneficiary.
Not $1. When I asked her why, she looked at me over her glasses and said, “You’ve got the business. They’ve got the money. That way nobody can say you were on both sides of the table.
”
In February 2019, after the stroke, two licensed physicians signed a certification of incapacity. From that morning forward, I was the acting trustee. She died on November 3rd, 2021 at 4:40 in the morning with the window cracked because she liked to hear the yard. Her will went through probate.
The trust did not. That is the entire point of a trust. At the moment of her death, it stopped being revocable. Nobody living could change one word of it.
Not my mother. Not me. The second thing is the building. For four years, I had been trying to buy the old Masonic lodge on 1st Avenue North, three blocks from our Birmingham chapel.
Brick, 1926, tin ceilings, and a hall that would seat 240 for a repast. Families in the city have nowhere to eat together after a service. They go to a hotel conference room or they go home separately. And going home separately is how grief gets lonely.
The price was $780,000. The closing was set for a Thursday at 9:00. My part in cash was $312,000, every dollar of it sixteen years of a woman living in a rented house and driving a 2015 Tahoe with 190,000 miles on it. Three months before the closing, my mother asked me to do two things.
She asked me to title the building in a new company called Summer Legacy Holdings LLC with her and Colby holding 60 percent and me holding 40. For estate reasons, she said. For the family. And she asked me as trustee to put $400,000 of my grandmother’s trust money into that LLC as an investment.
I said yes to the first one because family takes care of family. I said no to the second one in writing on July 18th in a two-page letter Lamar helped me draft, sent certified. I did not know it then, but that letter is the reason my phone rang in September. I was at my desk at 5:51 on that Wednesday, checking a date of birth against a social security card for Mr.
Leadbetter, a mail carrier in Ensley for 34 years who had asked to be buried in his uniform. The voicemail was 41 seconds long. I played it once at my ear and once on speaker because I did not believe the first one. “Thea, it’s your mother.
” Her voice was pleasant. That is the part nobody believes. She sounded the way she sounds when she is telling a caterer the shrimp were fine. “We took a vote, honey, and the family has decided it’s time for Colby to step up.
He’ll be the managing member going forward. So you’re out. Don’t come to the closing tomorrow. It’ll just be awkward for everybody.
And Thea… don’t bury me. Your brother will handle me when the time comes. I’ve made that clear to him. The sign comes down today.
We’ll talk when you’ve calmed down. ”
I set the phone on the blotter. The ceiling fan turned. I looked at Mr.
Leadbetter’s file and thought about his daughter coming in at 9 the next morning to see him in his uniform, and how she had asked me twice whether we would get the hat right. I picked up a pen and wrote 5:51 on the corner of my legal pad and under it the word voicemail. Then I opened my messages and typed one word: Okay. I hit send at 6:04.
Then I finished Mr. Leadbetter’s paperwork, because his daughter was coming at 9 and because that man was going to be buried right. At 7:20, I locked the chapel, got in the Tahoe, and drove to Utah. It is 85 miles from my chapel door to the gravel lot on Prairie Avenue.
I know every deer crossing on Highway 14 by the shape of the trees. That night I did not turn on the radio. I let myself add it up. In August I had looked up at the northeast corner of the sanctuary ceiling, and the water stain still there, shaped like Tennessee since the spring of 2019.
That mattered because in the 12 months before that, the trust had paid $146,000 to a company called Providence Chapel Restoration LLC for steeple repair and roof deck replacement. I approved those invoices. That is what a trustee does. You check that it is trust property, that the amount matches the bid, and you pay it.
I had not checked whether anyone had ever climbed on that roof. So in August I asked Emmitt Ruffin’s nephew Dwayne, who has put a roof on half of Green County, to go up there with a ladder and look. He called me from the ridge line. The flashing was original.
The deck was 1954 pine, and there was a bird’s nest in the steeple vent that had been there long enough to have a family history. “Ain’t nobody been on this roof since I don’t know when,” he said. That night I pulled the Secretary of State’s business filings. Providence Chapel Restoration LLC was registered in January of this year.
The registered agent’s address was 118 Lawson Street, Utah, Alabama. That is my brother’s rent house. In early September, I looked at the trust’s payroll ledger and found a line I had approved twelve times without ever once reading the words in it. Grief Care Coordinator, $10,200 a month, beginning the previous October.
Twelve payments. $122,400. There is no grief care program. There is a trifold brochure with a photograph of a woman looking at a lake, and a phone number that rings to the front desk in Utah.
In a year, nobody has ever called it. $146,000 and $122,400. I had done that arithmetic at a red light and gotten $268,400. And then I had done what I had been doing my entire life.
I had decided to handle it quietly so nobody’s Christmas would be ruined. That is the part I have to own. Nobody made me approve those invoices. I was so busy being the one who handles it that I stopped being the one who reads it.
I got to Prairie Avenue at 8:48. I let myself in the side door with my own key into my own building as the licensed funeral director in charge of that establishment, which is a phrase you will want to remember. I had come for my documents. My license.
My note to my grandmother’s estate. My copy of the trust. My carbon of the July 18th letter. I found all of it, and then I went to scan the letter.
The copier is in the back hall. There was a stack of paper in the output tray, somebody had run a job and walked off. I picked it up to move it, and the top page said in bold: Consent and Agreement of Beneficiaries. Under that: Eda L.
Summer Family Trust. I stood under a fluorescent tube with a bad ballast and read it standing up. Four pages, dated August 27th. Paragraph 4 said the undersigned, being all of the qualified beneficiaries, hereby removed Thea Summerall as trustee and appointed Colby Summerall as successor trustee, effective immediately.
There were three signatures. My mother’s, enormous and looping. My brother’s, a C and a scribble. And my sister’s.
She had dated it wrong. August 27th written two different ways in two different boxes, which is what a person does when someone is standing over them saying just sign it right here. The document had been made three weeks before my mother left me that voicemail. Three weeks while I was sending her the closing schedule.
I turned the page. Behind the consent document were eleven more pages. And those pages changed everything. They were preneed contracts.
In Alabama, when a family pays for a funeral in advance, that is a preneed contract, and it is not my money. It is the family’s money, held for the day they need it. The law is not vague about what happens next. That money goes into a preneed trust account or is funded with an insurance policy, and the Alabama Department of Insurance audits it.
Eleven contracts, every one signed between March and September. Every one from a family in Green County. Clipped to the back, a deposit slip. I flattened it with two fingers and read it four times.
First Kahaba bank deposit slip. Eleven checks. Total $67,400. The account number ended in 4419.
Account 4419 is Summerall Legacy Holdings LLC. Not the preneed trust account. Not an insurance carrier. My mother’s company.
I pulled the preneed statements from the steel file cabinet. March through September. I ran my finger down the deposit columns. Not one of the eleven was there.
Then I read the names. The fourth contract was purchaser Odessa Pruit, age 79, County Road 20. Full traditional service at Antioch Chapel. Steel casket, green canopy, 200 folders.
Total $8,900, paid by cashier’s check on March 6th. Miss Odessa, who my mother sat with on the floor in 1993 with a plate of egg salad sandwiches. Who has told me at three church suppers, patting my hand, that she is all taken care of. She was not taken care of.
She had $8,900 in a limited liability company that had already spent it. And if she had died that week, the person who would have had to stand in that family room and explain it would have been me. And the license number on all 11 of those contracts was mine. I did not shout.
I did not cry. I have a rule about that building: we do not have feelings in the hallway. I took out my phone and photographed every page. 43 pages, laid flat one at a time on the copier glass with the lid up.
The first photograph is timestamped 11:31. The last is 11:47. Then I put it all back exactly as I found it, down to the quarter inch of overhang on the stack. I sat in the Tahoe in that gravel lot with the engine off for nine minutes.
For the first four, I was not thinking about Miss Odessa at all. I was thinking about a woman who had spent sixteen years learning how to tell a stranger their father was gone, and who had just been told by voicemail, in a pleasant voice, that she would not be allowed to do that for her own mother. I wanted her to be afraid. I wanted her to feel the exact drop I felt at 5:51.
Then I looked at that building. My grandfather poured those steps in 1954 and they are still not level. I know exactly which one catches people’s heels, and I stand on that step at every visitation with my hand out because of it. And I thought about the fact that if I did one single thing in the next twelve hours for the reason I wanted to do it instead of for a reason I could write down and hand to a judge, my mother would be right about me for the rest of her life.
The wanting did not go away. It just stopped being the thing driving the car. By the time I hit the county line, I had stopped being the daughter and started being the trustee. And those two people do not want the same things.
A trustee is not an owner. My mother, my brother, and my sister are the beneficiaries. They get the good of it. I hold it.
I do not get $1, and I never will. And in exchange for that, I owe every one of those three people the same honest hand. That is called impartiality, and it is not a courtesy. It is the job.
But I also could not keep writing checks. The minute I had credible evidence that trust money was being taken through a shell vendor and a paper job, every dollar I handed over after that was a dollar I was taking from Miss Odessa and from a dead woman’s instructions. At 3:52 in the morning, I sent the first email, to the closing attorney, with the lender copied. I was withdrawing my personal guarantee of the loan, effective immediately, and revoking my authorization to disperse the $312,000 held in his escrow account.
I would not be attending the closing. I was not asking for the escrow to be released to anyone until the parties agreed or a court said otherwise, because I did not want one honest word said about me later. Nobody on this earth can make you sign your name. The loan was conditioned on my guarantee.
Take my signature off the table and there is no loan. The closing did not die because I attacked it. It died because I declined to hold it up anymore. At 3:52 I sent the second email, to my mother, my brother, and my sister individually and by name.
The subject line was Notice of Suspension of Discretionary Distributions, Eda L. Summer Family Trust. You cannot freeze a trust. That is not a thing that exists.
A trustee who shuts the money off because her feelings got hurt is a trustee who gets removed and sued, and she deserves it. What I did has a longer name. Under Article 5 of my grandmother’s trust, every distribution is discretionary, not automatic. The trustee may distribute for health, education, maintenance, and support in her judgment.
There is not one mandatory dollar in that document. My grandmother wrote it that way on purpose in 2014 because she knew her daughter. My letter said that I had come into possession of records indicating $268,400 in disbursements from trust assets that appeared to be unsupported. That pending a formal accounting, all discretionary distributions were suspended as of that date.
That the trust-issued credit card was cancelled. That the monthly distribution of $6,000 was stopped. That Colby was removed as an authorized signer. That I would provide a complete formal accounting to every beneficiary within 30 days.
That any beneficiary who disagreed could have every document unredacted on request. That I intended to file a petition for instructions in the circuit court of Green County, and that I would not oppose any petition asking that court to review my own conduct as trustee, because if I was wrong, I wanted to be told so by somebody who did not love me or hate me. I sent it to three people by name at 3:52 in the morning. Then I sent the same thing certified mail at 9:15.
At 9 that Thursday morning, in a conference room on 1st Avenue North, four people sat down at a table for a closing that was not going to happen. My phone showed 63 missed calls. I was 30 blocks away in my own chapel with Mr. Leadbetter’s daughter, showing her the hat.
We got it right. The brim was clean, the crease was where it should be, the gold letters turned square to the room. She put her hand flat on it and stood there a long time and did not say anything. And I stood there with her, because that is the job, and the job does not care what your mother said on Wednesday.
Lamar called at 6:15. “Read it to me,” he said. I did. He told me to send an amended notice and take out where I said appeared to be.
Say what the records show and nothing past it. You are not accusing anybody of a crime. You are stating what you found and what you are doing about it. I sent the amended notice at 2:40.
Then he told me three things. One, that consent document was not worth the toner. Beneficiaries do not get to vote a trustee out. Removal is a court’s job on a petition for cause, and no circuit judge in Alabama is going to hand my grandmother’s trust to a man whose rent house is the registered address of the vendor.
Two, my mother was going to claim there was a spendthrift clause protecting her. There is one, and it protects her from her creditors, not from my duty to write only the checks I can stand behind. Three, that trust went irrevocable the morning my grandmother died. Nobody living can change a comma of it.
“You are not the boss of that money, Thea,” he said. “You are the hired hand of a dead woman with very good handwriting. ”
Then I told him about the eleven contracts. The line went quiet a long time.
“Thea,” he said. “That’s not a trust problem. Put that down and pick up the phone. ”
At 9:02 that Thursday morning, I wired $67,400 of my own money into the preneed trust account at First Kahaba.
There was no drama in it. At 2:00 that afternoon, I self-reported a funding deficiency at my own establishment to the preneed division of the Alabama Department of Insurance. I gave them eleven contract numbers. I told them the money was already back in the account.
I told them I was the licensee of record and the deficiency was on my license whether I had known about it or not. Lamar asked me if I understood what I was doing. “They can look at me all they want,” I said. “I’ve got receipts back to 2010.
And if Miss Odessa Pruit dies on a Tuesday and her son finds out at the graveside that her money is gone, then I am exactly what my mother says I am. ”
Friday morning at 11:12, a text from a number I did not know. Ms. Summerall, this is Denton Lagon in Tuscaloosa.
I represent your mother. We have a serious problem. I replied, “Mr. Lagon, we do.
I reported it yesterday afternoon. Please advise your client to retain separate criminal counsel, because you cannot represent both her and your own file. My accounting will be with you inside 30 days, and I will be asking the circuit court to review my administration, including my own conduct. I am not hard to reach.
”
He answered nine days later in a two-page letter that used the word regrettable four times. I also handed the entire file to Ardith Pickens, the trust officer at First Kahaba, who serves as special trustee under Article 11 for anything where I have a personal interest, including the $2,600 a month my company pays the trust to rent the Prairie Avenue Chapel. I asked her to review that lease. I asked her to review me.
“Most people in your chair don’t ask for that,” she said. “That’s how they end up in the paper,” I said. The certified letter to my mother came back on the 11th day with a green sticker. Unclaimed.
The second one came back the same way. I did not throw them away. I put them in a drawer, sealed, with the postmarks showing. Then it was the third Sunday in October, and in Green County the third Sunday in October is homecoming.
Antioch Baptist Church sits on a rise off County Road 20 with a gravel lot and a cemetery that runs downhill toward the pines. My grandfather is in the third row from the fence. My grandmother is beside him under a flat granite marker that says Eda L. Summer and nothing else, because she said an epitaph was just advertising.
That year, 186 people signed the register. Summer Funeral Home has put the green canopy over the dessert table at Antioch homecoming every October since 1954. Emmitt and I set it up at 8:30 that morning. I hammered the stakes myself in the red dirt, and I made him move the northwest leg two inches because it was leaning.
You carry them level. Brother Ezra Toiver preached on the prodigal. I did not take it personally. We sang with the windows open because it was 81 degrees in the middle of October, like it always is.
I ate at the end of the third table with Emmitt and his wife. Miss Odessa Pruit sat two seats down with her purse in her lap, the way she keeps it. My mother sat at the first table with the church ladies, holding court. Colby stood over by the trucks.
Cecile went up and down the tables with a tea pitcher and did not look at me once. At 1:20, my mother stood up with her plate still in her hand. “I want everybody here to know what my daughter did to me. ” Three tables went quiet, then five, then the whole field.
“She froze my mother’s trust,” Glenda said, her voice pitched to carry to the pecan trees. “She cut off her own mother. I can’t pay my light bill this month. She’s stealing from her own mother.
”
I did not stand up right away. I finished chewing. I set my fork down. I wiped my hands on a paper napkin and folded it and put it under the edge of my plate.
Then I stood up, and I did not raise my voice one bit, because I have learned in sixteen years that in a crowd the quiet one is the one everybody leans into. “Mama,” I said. “You’ve got three letters from me. Two came back unclaimed.
” I reached into my bag and took out the third one, still sealed, with the green sticker on the front. I walked up the row between the tables and set it down beside her plate. “You can open it here, or you can open it at home. But you don’t get to tell 186 people I wouldn’t explain myself.
”
“I need my money. ”
“It isn’t your money. It’s grandmama’s money. And she left three of you the good of it and left me the job of holding it.
I don’t get a dollar of it. I never have. ”
“Then turn it back on. ”
“I can’t.
Not while there’s $268,400 out of it that nobody can account for. ” I said the number once, plainly. “146,000 went to a roofing company for work on a roof nobody has been on since 2019. I had a man climb up there in August and photograph a bird’s nest.
122,000 went to a salary for a job that has a brochure and no clients. I approved every one of those payments myself without reading them, and that is my fault, and it is in my accounting in my own words. ”
Colby came off the fender of his truck. “You don’t get to stand up in front of this church and—”
That is when the wrecker turned into the lot.
Flatbed, orange, out of Demopolis. It came up the gravel slow the way they do, and stopped behind Colby’s truck. A heavyset man in a company shirt got out with a clipboard and said, “Afternoon, folks. Sorry to do this today.
”
The truck note was $1,190 a month, and my grandmother’s trust card had been paying my brother’s personal truck note automatically for three years, which is its own line in my accounting. I cancelled that card at 3:52 in the morning. The October payment came due with nothing behind it. The lender puts a starter interrupt in every unit on that lot, and eighteen days past due is a long time to people like that, and they do not care what Sunday it is.
The driver was polite about it. That was the worst part. He asked Colby to please get his personal items out of the cab. And my brother stood in a churchyard in front of 186 people and carried a gym bag, a phone charger, and a case of motor oil to the grass while the winch ran.
Ashlin, his wife, watched the whole thing from the end of the second table. Then she walked over and asked him one question, and she did not lower her voice. “Colby, whose name is on that Providence company? ”
He did not answer her.
He looked at his mother. Ashlin nodded once, the way you nod when a thing you already knew finally has a date on it. And she got in her own car and drove out past the wrecker. Then Miss Odessa Pruit stood up.
She is 79 years old, and she stood up slow with a hand on the table, purse in the other hand. “Thea baby, can I ask you something in front of everybody, because I don’t understand my letter? ”
“Yes, ma’am. ”
She got an envelope out of her purse.
State of Alabama letterhead. “It says my funeral contract had a funding deficiency. Says it’s been cured. I don’t know what any of that means.
I paid you all in March. I gave your mama a cashier’s check at my kitchen table for $8,900, and she sat there and drank my coffee. ”
The field was so quiet I could hear the canopy ticking in the sun. I said the truth in the fewest words I could find, because Miss Odessa did not deserve a speech.
“Miss Odessa, your funeral is paid for. Every dollar. The money didn’t get put where the law says it goes. When I found that out, I put it back myself the same week, out of my own account.
Then I called the state and told on my own funeral home. That’s what your letter means. Your service is at this church. Steel casket, green canopy, 200 folders, just like you picked.
Nothing about that has changed. ”
She looked at me a long moment. “Well, all right then. ” And she sat down.
And then she turned her head and looked at my mother. I did not do that. I never once said my mother’s name in that field. But 186 people had just watched an old woman ask who took her cashier’s check, and in Green County that arithmetic does not take long, and it does not need any help from me.
My mother’s face came apart in stages. “We were drowning, Thea. ” It came out cracked and low. “The lot on Lawson Street, the cards, all of it.
We were drowning, and you were sitting up there in Birmingham approving invoices. ”
“I know you were,” I said. “You could have told me in August. ”
“You could have told me in 2019.
”
Her chin came up, and I watched the mask slide back over her face. “You’d have let us,” she said. That is when I stopped being sad. “I didn’t take anything from you,” I said.
“I stopped handing it to you. ”
She started to speak, and I did not let her. “You told me not to bury you. I’ve thought about that every night for a month, and I want you to hear my answer in front of these people, because you said it in front of a voicemail.
” I took a breath. “I’ll still bury you, Mama. I just won’t fund you. ”
Nobody moved.
Colby said from the grass, with his gym bag in his hand, that it did not matter, that the family had voted, that he was taking over the funeral home. “Colby,” I said. “The Alabama Board of Funeral Service does not recognize family votes. There is exactly one licensed funeral director in this family.
Grandmama made sure of that. If you want to be the second one, I will pay your tuition and find you an apprenticeship at a firm in Selma where nobody knows your name, and I’ll do it this week. That offer is real, and it is open. ”
He told me what I could do with it.
That was the only time all day I came close to crying, and it was not about the funeral home. I sat back down and finished my tea. My mother left with a church lady driving her. Colby got a ride with a cousin.
The wrecker took the truck out past the cemetery gate with the flashers on, slow because of the gravel. Then I got up and helped the ladies scrape plates, and at 4:00 Emmitt and I took the canopy down, folded the green canvas in thirds the way my grandmother folded it, and put it in the van. Before we left, a man named Pervis Yelverton came over with his hat in his hand and said his uncle was on hospice in Livingston and would probably not see Thanksgiving, and could he call me. I said yes, sir.
I gave him a card. Here is what happened after. And I want you to notice that almost none of it was done by me. The Alabama Department of Insurance opened an examination of my establishment in November.
It ran 14 weeks. Their finding was that the deficiency existed, that it had been cured before the examination began, and that the licensee had self-reported. My establishment permit continued under a consent order: quarterly preneed reporting for 24 months and a $2,500 administrative penalty, which I paid out of my own checking account. The same order referred the deposit question to the district attorney of Green County.
That was not my referral. It is simply what happens when $67,400 in preneed funds lands in a limited liability company’s account instead of a trust account. Lamar filed the petition for instructions in the circuit court the week after homecoming. It was heard in February, took 50 minutes.
The judge approved my administration, confirmed that discretionary means discretionary, and ordered that any future distribution to my mother or my brother be offset against the amounts the court found had been taken. Denton Lagon withdrew as counsel two weeks later, citing a conflict. In April, facing the district attorney, my mother and my brother signed a restitution agreement rather than an indictment. Summerall Legacy Holdings LLC was dissolved.
The offsets against their trust shares total $335,800. At the rate the trust distributes, my mother will be 91 before she sees a check. She works now, three days a week, doing patient intake at a hearing aid office in Demopolis. I am not going to describe that with any pleasure, because there is none in it.
She is 64 and she is behind a counter eight hours a day, and she is good at it, because she was always good with names, and because there was a woman inside my mother who could have had a whole life if she had ever once been willing to be ordinary. Colby loads feed and seed at the co-op on Highway 14. Ashlin filed in March. That is her business and not mine.
I offered help once, properly, the way you are supposed to. In December I mailed my mother a card for a family mediator in Tuscaloosa, a licensed one, with a note saying I had prepaid three sessions and would sit in any room she picked with anybody she wanted present. The envelope came back in January with return to sender written across it in her handwriting, in the same ink she uses for thank-you notes. I kept the appointment slot open until March.
Then I let it go. The offer still stands, and she knows how to find me. Cecile came to the Birmingham chapel on a Saturday morning in November and stood in the kitchen doorway and could not get a sentence out. She had signed that consent document at our mother’s dining room table with a pen she was handed.
She was told it was about taxes. She was 24 and she had been raised by the same woman I was raised by. I forgave her. It took me about nine seconds, and I have never gone back on it.
But I said one thing and I meant it: “You can work here. You can live here if you need to. But you do not carry messages. Not one in either direction, ever.
You are not going to be the rope in this. ”
She started her apprenticeship in June. She is going to be better at this than I am, because she is kinder than I am, and she still cries at the graveside. And my grandmother always said the ones who stopped crying should find other work.
The week after Thanksgiving, I buried Pervis Yelverton’s uncle in Livingston. There were 31 people, a tent, a cold rain that stopped at exactly the right moment. I carried the flowers to the family car myself afterward, three trips, because that is a thing my grandmother did, and I have never been able to stop doing it. Fourteen months after that voicemail, I bought the lodge on 1st Avenue North alone.
$742,000 in the company’s name, with my guarantee on it and nobody else’s, and no LLC with anybody’s mother in it. It opened in the spring as the Eda Summerall Reception Hall. 240 chairs, tin ceilings, a kitchen that can put out 300 plates. The first thing we ever held in it was a repast for a family from Ensley who had been going home separately after funerals for three generations.
I also put a scholarship in her name. One year of tuition at the mortuary science program at Jefferson State, every year, for a student from the Black Belt. The first one went to a 23-year-old from Uniontown who wrote in her essay that she wanted to do this because nobody in her family had ever been buried by somebody who knew them. And there is one more thing I have never told anybody outside the office until right now.
My mother bought a preneed contract from Summerall Funeral Home in 2016. Contract 2016-0884. Full traditional service, Antioch Chapel, the green canopy. It is funded.
It has always been funded. I check it every quarter when I do the reporting, the same as I check the other 340. And when the day comes, I will do it myself in a navy suit, and I will get the hat right. She told me not to bury her.
That was never hers to decide. And it was never mine either. It belongs to whoever is still standing there when the time comes. For 26 years I thought you carry them level was about a casket.
It is not. My grandmother was telling a 12-year-old girl in a church parking lot that when you are holding something for other people, you do not tip it toward the one you love best. My mother wanted me to tip it. She thought that was what family meant.
Level was never a favor I was doing her. Level was the entire job. And the day I finally did it right, she called it stealing. A voicemail I have never deleted, 41 seconds long.
A certified letter that came back unclaimed with a green sticker on the front, still sealed in my desk drawer. And a green canvas canopy folded in thirds in the back of a van, one that has gone up over the dessert table at Antioch homecoming for 71 years, and went up again this October. Being trusted with something is not the same as being loved for it. And if the people who call you family only keep you while you are useful, understand clearly that they were never keeping you at all.
They were spending you.
