My name is Thea Sumrall. I am thirty-eight years old, and in sixteen years I have directed 1,842 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, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a folder of death certificates open 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. Let me back up. 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. Greene County had 16,000 people then, and two funeral homes. Now it has fewer people than 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 seventy-one years, in most of the houses between Boligee and Forkland, the answer has been the same.
Sumrall did it. My grandmother trained me. I started riding along with her when I was twelve, 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, and I have kept them current for sixteen years without a single complaint on file. In 2016, my grandmother sold me the business. Not gave.
Sold. She wrote a note for $340,000 at $2,400 a month, and I have made 112 payments on it, the last forty-seven of them to her estate. 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 Sumrall, is sixty-four. She has never held a license.
She does not go in the prep room, and she has never once sat with a family at two in the morning while they decide whether to open the casket. What she does is arrive at the visitation at 6:10 in a good dress, touch three people on the elbow, say something warm, and leave by seven. For years, that was fine. It was even useful.
She has a memory for names that I would trade a finger for. My brother Colby is thirty-four. 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 CeCe is twenty-four.
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. In our family, I had a role, and it had a name, and the name was said with a kind of affection that I mistook for love for about twenty years. 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 separate times. Always in January. Always after a slow December. Nine times I moved money out of my personal savings into the company account so that Emmett Ruffin, who has driven our lead car since 1994, would not have a check bounce.
The total over those three years 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 thirty-one nights in a row after work.
My mother came on Sundays. She brought magazines. She always 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 had to hold down the fort. Somebody always did. At the family’s Iron Bowl party in 2023, with thirty people in her den and the game on two televisions, my mother said the sentence.
“I still hear it when I’m tired. ” Someone had asked what exactly Colby did at the funeral home. She 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 I have decided that 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 six years old, and I was in the back of the chapel where I was supposed to be asleep on a pallet of quilts.
I watched my mother, who was thirty-two then, 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 three 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, my mother decided that the work was beneath her and the standing was owed to her. She wanted the name without the two in the morning. Now, the two things you need to know before the voicemail, and I will keep them plain.
The first is my grandmother’s trust. In June of 2014, Eda Sumrall drove herself to Birmingham and sat down with a lawyer named Lamar Whitfield, who was sixty then and is seventy-one now, and who has a corner office on 20th Street with a window unit he refuses to replace. She created the Eda L. Sumrall Family Trust.
She put in the timberland, 214 acres of pine and red dirt 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 one dollar. 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. ”
I did not understand what she was protecting me from. I understand now.
In February of 2019, after the stroke, two licensed physicians signed a certification of incapacity under Article Nine of the trust. That is what the document required. Not a family vote. Not my say-so.
Two doctors, in writing, on the form the trust named. From that morning forward, I was the acting trustee. She died on November 3rd, 2021, at 4:40 in the morning at home with the window cracked because she liked to hear the yard. Her will was probated in Greene County Probate Court that January.
The trust did not go through probate at all, which is the entire point of a trust. And at the moment of her death, that trust 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 people 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 nine, with a closing attorney named Wendell Barlowe.
The bank was First Cahaba, and the loan was conditioned on one thing above all others. My personal guarantee, signed at the table with my license number and my nine years of clean financials behind it. My part in cash was $312,000. It was my money.
Every dollar of it was sixteen years of a woman living in a rented house in Crestwood 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 Sumrall Legacy Holdings LLC, with her and Colby holding sixty percent and me holding forty. “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 and because I was tired and because I have carried her level my whole life. I said no to the second one, in writing, on July 18th, in a two-page letter that Lamar helped me draft and that I sent certified.
I did not know it then, but that letter is the reason my phone rang in September. The Birmingham chapel has an arrangement office with a window unit, a ceiling fan, and a smell I have never been able to get out of the carpet, which is lemon oil and carnation. I was at the desk at 5:51 on that Wednesday with a folder of death certificates open in front of me. I was checking a date of birth against a social security card for a man named Mr.
Leadbetter, who had been a mail carrier in Ensley for thirty-four years and who had asked to be buried in his uniform. My phone buzzed, face down on the desk blotter. I let it go. The voicemail was forty-one seconds long.
I played it once with the phone 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 when I tell it.
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… ” A little pause.
A breath. “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. ”
Then, brightly, “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, at the box on the certificate where I would sign my license number, and I thought about the fact that his daughter was coming in at nine the next morning to see him in his uniform, and that she had asked me twice on the phone whether we would get the hat right. I write times down for a living. 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 nine and because whatever else was happening, 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 eighty-five miles from my chapel door to the gravel lot on Prairie Avenue. I have made that drive in the dark more times than I can count, in a hearse and in a van and in my own car, and I know every deer crossing on Highway 14 by the shape of the trees.
That night I did not turn on the radio. I drove, and I let myself do the thing I had been refusing to do since August. I let myself add it up. In August I had been at the Utah chapel for a service, and I had looked up at the northeast corner of the sanctuary ceiling, and the water stain was still there.
It is shaped like Tennessee. It has been shaped like Tennessee since the spring of 2019. That mattered, because in the twelve months before that, the trust had paid $146,000 to a company called Providence Chapel Restoration LLC for steeple repair, roof deck replacement, and moisture remediation at the Prairie Avenue property. I know it paid that, because I approved the invoices.
That is what a trustee does. An invoice comes in for the upkeep of trust real estate. You check that it is trust property. You check that the amount matches the bid.
You pay it. I had checked that the amounts matched the bids. I had not checked whether anyone had ever climbed on that roof. So in August I asked Emmett Ruffin’s nephew Dwayne, who has put a roof on half of Greene County, to go up there with a ladder and look.
He called me from the ridge line. He said 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. “Who told you they had? ”
I said I would call him back. That night I pulled the Secretary of State’s business filings on my laptop at my kitchen table.
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. I have carried a Christmas ham up those front steps.
In early September, I looked at the trust’s payroll ledger, which I also approve, 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 there is a phone number on it that rings to the front desk in Utah. CeCe answers it.
And in a year, nobody has ever called it. $146,000 and $122,400. I had done that arithmetic in my head at a red light on 20th Street and gotten $268,400. And then I had done what I had been doing my entire life.
I had decided to handle it quietly, after the closing, 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.
My grandmother put me in that chair to protect three people. And for a year, I protected two of them from consequences and one of them from nothing at all. I got to Prairie Avenue at 8:48. The security light over the gravel was doing the thing it does, buzzing and then going quiet.
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. I keep originals in a fireproof cabinet in the back office. My license.
My note to my grandmother’s estate. My copy of the trust with Lamar’s tab still in it. And my carbon of the July 18th letter, in which I had declined, as trustee, to put $400,000 of my grandmother’s money into my mother’s LLC. I found all of it.
Then I went to scan the letter, because I wanted a copy on my own laptop before I drove home. And the scanner is the copier. And the copier is a Konica in the back hall that has been there since 2018. There was a stack of paper in the output tray.
Somebody had run a job and walked off. It happens twice a week in that office. I picked the stack up to move it to the counter so I could raise the lid. The top page said, in bold, centered: Consent and Agreement of Beneficiaries.
And under that: Eda L. Sumrall Family Trust. I stood in that hallway under a fluorescent tube with a bad ballast and I read it standing up. It was four pages.
It was dated August 27th. Paragraph Four said that the undersigned, being all of the qualified beneficiaries of the trust, did thereby remove Thea Sumrall as trustee and appoint Colby Sumrall as successor trustee, effective immediately. There were three signatures. My mother’s, which is enormous and loops under itself.
My brother’s, which is a C and a scribble. And my sister’s. CeCe had signed it. She had dated it wrong.
August 27th written as 8/27/24 in one box and August 27th in another, 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. Three weeks while I was asking her what color she wanted the awning.
I want to tell you what I felt. And I honestly cannot, because what I felt was nothing at all. The way you feel nothing when you get a bad phone call and your body decides to wait. What I did was turn the page.
Behind the consent document were eleven more pages. And those pages changed everything. They were preneed contracts. In Alabama, when a family walks into my chapel and 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 state form has the purchaser’s name, the contract number, the goods and services selected, and the total. And the law is not vague about what happens next. That money goes into a preneed trust account, or it is funded with an insurance policy, and the Alabama Department of Insurance audits it, and the funeral establishment’s license hangs on it.
Eleven contracts. Every one of them signed between March and September of this year. Every one of them from a family in Greene County. And clipped to the back, a deposit slip.
I set the stack on the counter and I flattened that slip with two fingers and I read it four times. It was a First Cahaba Bank deposit slip. It listed eleven checks. The total was $67,400.
The account number ended in 4419. Account 4419 is Sumrall Legacy Holdings LLC. Not the preneed trust account. Not an insurance carrier.
My mother’s company. The one she wanted the building titled in. The one she wanted my grandmother’s $400,000 in. I went to the steel file cabinet where we keep the preneed trust statements.
Second drawer. I pulled March, April, May, June, July, August, September. I ran my finger down the deposit columns. I know those statements.
I sign the annual report. Not one of the eleven was there. Then I did the thing that took the ground out from under me. I went back to the contracts and I read the names.
The fourth one was contract number 2024-1173. Purchaser: Odessa Pruit, age 79. Address: County Road 20. Selected: full traditional service at Antioch Chapel.
A steel casket. The 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 separate church suppers, patting my hand, that she is all taken care of and I am not to worry about her. 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 eleven of those contracts was mine. I did not shout.
I did not cry. I have a rule about that building, which is that we do not have feelings in the hallway. I took out my phone and I photographed every page. Forty-three pages, laid flat, one at a time, on the copier glass with the lid up so the light was even.
The first photograph is timestamped 11:31. The last one is 11:47. Then I put it all back. Consent document on top.
Preneed contracts in the order I found them, one through eleven. Deposit slip clipped where it had been. I squared the stack on the counter and set it back in the output tray with the same quarter inch of overhang it had when I picked it up, because I had noticed the overhang, because noticing is the job. I put the March-through-September statements back in the second drawer.
I turned off the hall light. I locked the side door. I sat in the Tahoe in that gravel lot with the engine off for nine minutes. The security light buzzed and went quiet.
Buzzed and went quiet. Down Prairie Avenue, somebody’s dog was going at it. I want to be honest about those nine minutes, because they are the only part of this I am not proud of. For the first four of them, I was not thinking about Miss Odessa at all.
I was thinking about myself. I was thinking about a woman who had spent sixteen years learning how to tell a stranger that 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 sat there and I let myself want something ugly. I wanted her to be afraid.
I wanted her to feel the exact drop I felt at 5:51 with a folder of death certificates open in front of me. Then I looked through the windshield at the front of 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. She would tell it at every card table in Greene County. “My daughter got mad and locked us out. ”
The wanting did not go away.
I have not lied to you yet, and I am not going to start. It just stopped being the thing driving the car. I thought about my grandmother in the Cadillac with the bench seat, telling a twelve-year-old girl in a church parking lot the only thing she ever really taught me. Whatever else happens, you carry them level.
I had spent my whole life thinking that was about the casket. I drove back to Birmingham with both hands on the wheel and the window cracked. And 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.
The daughter wanted to call my mother and scream. The trustee had a duty, and the duty was not to me. Here is the thing my mother never understood, and it is the thing that decided everything that came after. A trustee is not an owner.
My grandmother was the grantor. She put the money in. My mother, my brother, and my sister are the beneficiaries. They get the good of it.
I am the trustee. I hold it. I do not get one dollar, and I never will. And in exchange for that, I owe every single one of those three people the same honest hand.
It is called impartiality, and it is not a courtesy. It is the job. Which means I could not do what my mother would have done in my chair. I could not shut it off because she hurt my feelings.
Spite is not a legal reason, and a trustee who acts on it gets removed, personally surcharged, and sued, and deserves all three. But I also could not keep writing checks. Because the minute I had credible, documented 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 the remainder, and from a dead woman’s instructions. There was a legal reason.
It was sitting on my passenger seat in forty-three photographs. I got home at 12:41 in the morning. I did not go to bed. At 1:06, I sent an email to Wendell Barlowe, the closing attorney, with the lender and the seller’s agent copied.
And I read it out loud to myself twice before I hit send, the way I read a eulogy. I wrote that I was withdrawing my personal guarantee of the First Cahaba loan, effective immediately, and that I was revoking my authorization to disperse the $312,000 of my personal funds held in his escrow account. I wrote that I would not be attending the closing and would not be signing. I wrote that I was not asking for the escrow to be released to anyone, including me, until the parties agreed or a court said otherwise, because I did not want one honest word said about me later.
That is the whole trick, and there is nothing clever in it. Nobody on this earth can make you sign your name. The loan was conditioned on my guarantee. My license and my nine years of clean financials were the only reason that bank was lending on a 1926 brick building at all.
Take my signature off the table, and there is no loan. Take the loan away, and there is no $780,000. The closing did not die because I attacked it. It died because I declined to hold it up anymore.
At 3:52 in the morning, I sent the second email. And that one went to my mother, my brother, and my sister, individually and by name. Then I made coffee and watched it get light over the pines behind my rented house. At nine in the 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.
By 9:00, my phone showed sixty-three missed calls. I was not looking at it. At 9:00, I was thirty blocks from that conference room, in my own chapel, with Mr. Leadbetter’s daughter showing her the hat.
We got it right. The brim was clean, and the crease was where it should be, and the gold letters on the front were 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.
I want to read you part of what I sent at 3:52, because people get this wrong, and I got it wrong myself for years. The subject line was: Notice of Suspension of Discretionary Distributions, Eda L. Sumrall Family Trust. You cannot freeze a trust.
I have heard people say it in my own family’s kitchen, and I have said it myself before I ever sat in that chair. It is not a thing that exists. There is no red switch. A trustee who shuts the money off because her feelings got hurt is a trustee who gets removed, surcharged out of her own pocket, and sued by the very people she was trying to punish.
And she deserves every bit of it. What I did has a longer name, and it will not fit on anybody’s sign. Under Article Five of my grandmother’s trust, every distribution to my mother, my brother, and my sister is discretionary. Not automatic.
Not owed. The trustee may distribute for health, education, maintenance, and support, in her judgment, taking the whole picture into account. There is not one mandatory dollar in that document. My grandmother wrote it that way on purpose, sitting in a lawyer’s office in 2014 in a chair with a bad spring, because she knew her daughter.
So my letter said this: that I had come into possession of records indicating $268,400 in disbursements from trust assets that appeared to be unsupported, $146,000 to a vendor for work I had confirmed was never performed, and $122,400 in salary for a position with no documented duties. That, pending a formal accounting, all discretionary distributions were suspended as of that date. That the trust-issued credit card was cancelled. That the recurring monthly distribution of $6,000 was stopped.
That Colby was removed as an authorized signer on the trust operating account. And the vendor autopayment to Providence Chapel Restoration was terminated. And then, the four paragraphs that matter more than any of that. That I would provide a complete formal accounting to every beneficiary within thirty days, at the trust’s expense.
That any beneficiary who disagreed could have every document I had, unredacted, on request. That I intended to file a petition for instructions in the Circuit Court of Greene County, and let a judge decide whether I was administering this trust correctly. 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. Lamar Whitfield called me back at 6:15. I could hear his window unit through the phone. “Read it to me,” he said.
So I did. He was quiet a second. “Send an amended notice this afternoon, and take out where you say ‘appeared to be. ‘ Say what the records show, and nothing past it.
You are not accusing anybody of a crime in that letter. You are stating what you found, and what you are doing about it. And the day a judge reads it, I want it to sound like a bookkeeper wrote it, and not a daughter. ”
I sent the amended notice at 2:40.
“Now,” he said. “Three things, and then I’ll get dressed. One: the paper they ran off your copier is not worth the toner. Beneficiaries do not get to vote a trustee out.
They can agree with each other until they’re blue in the face. Removal is a court’s job, on a petition for cause, and no circuit judge in Alabama is going to hand your grandmother’s trust to a man whose rent house is the registered address of the vendor. “Two: your mother is going to tell everybody in Greene County there’s a spendthrift clause and that it protects her. There is one, and it does protect her from her creditors.
It stops anybody she owes from reaching into that trust, and it stops her from signing her interest away for a loan. It has never once, in the history of Alabama, required a trustee to write a discretionary check. “Three… ” He paused.
“That trust went irrevocable the morning your grandmother died. November 3rd, 2021. Nobody living can change a comma of it. Not your mother.
Not your brother. And not you. You are not the boss of that money, Thea. You are the hired hand of a dead woman with very good handwriting.
”
Then he asked me if that was everything. And I told him about the eleven contracts. The line went quiet for 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 Cahaba, from the account I had built up over sixteen years and had been about to spend on a building. There was no drama in it.
I typed the number, and I confirmed it, and I printed the receipt. At 2:00 that afternoon, I called the preneed division of the Alabama Department of Insurance and self-reported a funding deficiency at my own establishment. I gave them eleven contract numbers. I told them the money was already back in the account, and that the deposit had gone to a limited liability company I did not own or control.
I told them I was the licensee of record, and that the deficiency was on my license whether I had known about it or not. At 4:30, I emailed the written report with the deposit slip attached. Lamar had asked me on the phone if I understood what I was doing. “You’re handing the state a reason to come look at you,” he said.
“They can look at me all they want,” I said. “I’ve got receipts back to 2010. And Mr. Whitfield, 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, my phone buzzed with a number I did not know. It was a text, not a call, which told me the man sending it did not want a recording of his voice on anything. “Ms. Sumrall, this is Denton Lagone in Tuscaloosa.
I represent your mother. We have a serious problem. ”
I finished the paragraph I was writing. Then I replied.
“Mr. Lagone, 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 thirty days, and I will be asking the circuit court to review my administration, including my own conduct. I am not hard to reach. ”
He did not answer that day. 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 Cahaba, who serves as special trustee under Article Eleven 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, which was set by an appraisal in 2017 and which I have never once had the authority to adjust. I asked her to review that lease. I asked her to review me. She looked at me over the file and said, “You know, most people in your chair don’t ask for that.
”
“That’s how they end up in the paper,” I said. The certified letter to my mother came back on the eleventh day with a green sticker on it. Unclaimed. The second one came back the same way.
I did not throw either of them away. I put them in a drawer, sealed, with the postmarks showing. CeCe texted me once at 1:40 in the morning. “I didn’t know what it was,” she said.
“She said it was for grandma’s taxes. ”
I typed and deleted four answers and finally sent, “I believe you. We’ll talk after. ”
Then it was the third Sunday in October.
And in Greene 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.
Sumrall” and nothing else, because she said an epitaph was just advertising. Homecoming is the biggest day of the year out there. Service at eleven, and then dinner on the grounds, which means eight folding tables under the pecan trees, foil pans three deep, two orange coolers of sweet tea, and every family in that end of the county in the same field at the same time. 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. Emmett and I set it up at 8:30 that morning. I hammered the stakes myself in the red dirt, and I stood back and looked at it and made him move the northwest leg two inches, because it was leaning. You carry them level.
Brother Ezra Toiver preached on the prodigal, which I did not take personally. And we sang “Shall We Gather at the River” 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 Emmett and his wife. Miss Odessa Pruit sat two seats down from me with her purse in her lap, the way she keeps it.
My mother sat at the first table with the church ladies, in a navy dress, holding court. Colby stood over by the trucks with Ashlin, his wife, who is thirty-one and who works in medical billing in Tuscaloosa and who had, I noticed, driven separately. CeCe 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, in the way a field goes quiet from the middle outward.
“She froze my mother’s trust,” Glenda said. Her voice was steady and pitched to carry to the pecan trees, and I recognized it, because it is the voice she uses at a graveside. “She cut off her own mother. I can’t pay my light bill this month.
I have not had a dollar since the first, and she’s got $312,000 sitting in a lawyer’s account in Birmingham that was supposed to be for this family. ”
Somebody’s fork went down on a paper plate. “She’s stealing from her own mother,” my mother said. “And I want somebody here to tell her that’s not how we were raised.
”
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.
And 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, the green sticker on the front. And 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 don’t need a letter. 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. That’s the whole arrangement. 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 plainly once, and I did not repeat it.
“$146,000 of it 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 the 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 it 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, and I said so in a letter that came back unclaimed. The October payment came due on the first with nothing behind it. The lender out of Demopolis puts a starter interrupt in every unit on that lot and keeps a wrecker on retainer, 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 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 seventy-nine years old, and she stood up slow with a hand on the table, and she had her purse in the other hand, and she said, “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.
She held it out at arm’s length, the way you do when your glasses are in the car. “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 could have said a lot of things.
I have thought about it every day since. What I said was 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. And when I found that out, I put it back myself, the same week, out of my own account. And 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, and nothing about it is going to. ”
She looked at me a long moment. Then she said, “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 want to be very clear. 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 Greene 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 of her cracked and low, and it was, I think, the first true sentence she had said to me in ten years. “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. ”
And then her chin came up, and I watched the mask slide back over her face, and she said the thing that ended it. “And you’d have let us.
”
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. An establishment permit requires a licensed funeral director in charge. And there is exactly one licensed funeral director in this family. Grandmama made sure of that.
And 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. 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 four, Emmett 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. “Yes, sir,” I said.
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 fourteen weeks. Two examiners sat in my Utah office for four days with the preneed files and a laptop, and they were courteous and they missed nothing. 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 twenty-four months, and a $2,500 administrative penalty, which I paid out of my own checking account, not the company’s and not the trust’s, because it happened on my watch.
The same order referred the deposit question to the District Attorney of Greene County. That was not my referral, and it was not my choice. It is simply what happens when $67,400 in preneed lands in a limited liability company’s account instead of a trust account, and the people who decide what to do about it work in a courthouse, not in my family. Lamar filed the petition for instructions in the Circuit Court of Greene County the week after homecoming.
It was heard in February, took fifty minutes. The judge read my accounting, which by then was sixty-one pages, 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 Lagone withdrew as counsel two weeks later, citing a conflict, which is the politest possible way to say what he meant. In April, facing the district attorney, my mother and my brother signed a restitution agreement rather than an indictment.
Sumrall Legacy Holdings LLC was dissolved. First Cahaba had already closed its accounts in December, after its own fraud review, which nobody asked for and which found what it found. The offsets against their trust shares total $335,800. And at the rate the trust distributes, my mother will be ninety-one before she sees a check.
She works now, three days a week. She does patient intake at a hearing aid office in Demopolis, in a rolling chair with a name tag. I am not going to describe that with any pleasure, because there is none in it. She is sixty-four, 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, and that is her business and not mine. I offered help one time, 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.
I am not hard to reach. I told her lawyer that in writing. CeCe 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 twenty-four, and she had been raised by the same woman I was raised by, and she had never once in her life been shown what it looks like to say no in that house. I forgave her. 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. If Mama wants to tell me something, she can mail it. And if I want to tell her something, I will. 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 thirty-one people, a tent, a cold rain that stopped at exactly the right moment, the way it sometimes does. 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 First Cahaba, and 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 Sumrall Reception Hall. There are 240 chairs, tin ceilings, and 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 twenty-three-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, and I have never told anybody outside the office about it until right now. My mother bought a preneed contract from Sumrall 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 twenty-six years, I thought “you carry them level” was about a casket. It is not. My grandmother was telling a twelve-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.
That’s my story. It comes down to three things. A voicemail I have never deleted. Forty-one 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, that has gone up over the dessert table at Antioch homecoming for seventy-one 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. Take care of yourselves. Carry them level.
