Rent-A-Center

I just spoke with my friend, D, who lost her mother this past weekend, out of the blue. She's still in Pa, dealing with loose ends, and the wake is this evening. As is par for the course with D, she's already found her sense of humor about how this whole thing has gone down. She's had to. It's her survival mechanism.

As far as D knew, her mother, Jean, had no life insurance. She'd left behind a house full of furniture from Rent-A-Center, a car payment, and credit card debt. In yesterday's run around to get copies of the death certificate to all of the necessary establishments, they went in to Rent-A-Center to check that one off the list. The clerk at the counter mentioned that it was good they came in, they would need a copy of that death certificate to cash in her life insurance policy.

"Her what?" She and her brothers stood there, thinking they had to have heard wrong. "Who the fuck gets their life insurance policy from Rent-A-Center?"
"Your mom," answered the clerk.

Fortunately, most of the furniture and appliances in her house had already been paid off, so the five thousand dollars from Rent-A-Center, of all places, will cover the cost of the wake and pay off the fireplace she had just purchased for her son for Christmas. He gets to keep it.

D thinks she'll photocopy the life insurance policy and put it in a real bling frame and keep it on her wall at home, as a kind of homage to her mother. With all the shit she grew up with and all the craziness of her mother that she's learned to laugh about with time, the policy really just kind of sums it up.