Obituary: One Woman Is Dead. Three People Are Glad.

By Deborah C Sawyer

When Katelynn Joss returns from France in February 2020 to her childhood home in Toronto, it is not for a family reunion or a happy holiday. Nor is it just to sort out her recently deceased mother's possessions. Katelynn also finds herself sorting through the mistakes, outrages and deceits of her mother's life, as she writes the obituary. Alternatively nagged and encouraged in this task by her aunts, Agnes and Yolande, her mother's surviving siblings, Katelynn sets to work, every word sticking in her throat and stirring up a sandstorm of bitter memories. It takes her several weeks to sort out both the house and the obituary, which is finally published 4 ½ months after her mother died.

 

But, once the obituary is officially printed in the newspaper, it turns out Katelynn isn't the only person who is glad her mother is dead. Among the obituary readers are two other people who knew the deceased well and rejoice that Abigail Melinda Joss is finally dead.

 

Obituary is a story of love, loss, lies, murder, escape and the sordid underbelly of privilege. As a global pandemic rages, each of the three people stuck at home has time to dredge up their memories and put Abigail under the microscope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Information Plus (America) Inc.
• Release date: Jun 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215404461

Deborah C Sawyer

Deborah C. Sawyer is the author of several books, including both fiction and non-fiction. She has also written and published numerous professional articles over a 25 year career in business. She is also a gallery-hung artist and occasionally acts in film and TV.

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Deborah C. Sawyer

ISBN 979-8-218-02156-6

Praise for Earlier Novels By

Deborah C. Sawyer

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ASHES TO ASHES

A compelling tale of a man living a second life as his past threatens to catch up to him.

Befitting a novel about a man who’s a virtual chameleon, Sawyer peppers the closing chapters with unexpected twists, leaving readers admiring Albertson’s tenacity and the thoroughness of his deceit but also sympathizing with the family he left in the dust.

• - Kirkus Reviews

Ashes to Ashes is an enthralling novel that has great lessons for contemporary readers when it comes to identity theft and intrigue.

• - The Book Commentary

High tension, abundance of intrigue, and astonishing twists make the pages fly as the narrative builds to a shocking climax. Lovers of page-turning suspense won’t want to miss this one.

• - Prairies Book Reviews

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TO BE SOMEBODY

Well written and perfectly paced with not one, not two, but three finely-woven plot lines make for an extremely enjoyable weekend read!

• - Goodreads review

I’m thoroughly enjoying this title. The characters are definitely holding my attention and I’m growing ever more curious where the story is going.

•   – Amazon reader UK

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Copyright 2022 by Deborah C. Sawyer

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. All media rights, including for film, television, web series or other dramatic re-enactment, including radio and audio, are equally reserved as are rights for forms of media not yet in use. Published by Information Plus (America) Inc., 733 Delaware Rd., 103, Buffalo, NY 14223–1231.

Publisher’s Note: The author and publisher have taken care in preparation of this book but make no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information or programs contained herein.

This work is a work of fiction. Except for reference to persons well-known in the public domain, whether living or deceased, and to real events of an historical nature, the main characters and events are purely fictional.

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Information Plus (America) Inc. was aware of the trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sawyer, Deborah C., 1953-

Obituary/Deborah C Sawyer

ISBN 979 – 8 – 218 – 02156 – 6

262 pages

1. Fiction 2. Mystery I. Title

Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue, February 1, 2020.............................. 1

Katelynn, May 31, 2020 ..................................3

Rosalind, June 15, 2020 .................................97

Rob, August 31, 2020 ..................................161

Epilogue, October 5, 2020 .............................247

PROLOGUE

JOSS, Abigail Melinda

June 1, 1940 – February 1, 2020

At home on the night of February 1, 2020, Abigail Melinda Joss (née Raddeford) in her 80th year. Devoted wife of the late Montgomery Albert Joss and adored mother of her children. Survived by her sisters Agnes and Yolande, her daughter Katelynn, and her many nieces, nephews and cousins. Predeceased by her father J. William Raddeford and her mother Bertha Louise (née Wilshaw).

Abigail Raddeford was born on June 1, 1940 in Abbotsford, BC and raised in Seattle, WA where her father, of the prominent Des Moines, IA Raddeford family, was based at the time. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1962, she married Montgomery Joss and devoted her life to her family. Montgomery and Abigail made their homes variously in Manhattan, Mexico City, Brussels and Tokyo, as Montgomery pursued commissions for his architectural career, before the couple settled in Toronto where he became a full professor at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto.

Kind to animals, fond of chiffon, lover of good chocolates, cognac and Pernod. Big fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, All In The Family, The Price Is Right, French film noir and Disney cartoons. Whiz at doing crosswords. Giver of exquisitely wrapped gifts.

Abigail was also a voracious reader and especially fond of in-depth texts, reading works by Proust, de Scudéry, Mann, Tolstoy and others; she also read extensively in the esoteric literature, reading The Urantia Book many times and also several volumes of the Zohar (in translation). At different times, Abigail also took up flower arranging, solitaire, crochet and watercolors. Abigail and Montgomery were long-time members of the Granite Club, with which Abigail maintained an ongoing connection after Montgomery’s death.

Widowed in 2000, Abigail faced and overcame many challenges, especially health challenges over the last fifteen years, all of which she faced with Grace plus determination.

Cremation has taken place and, at the request of the deceased, there will be no funeral.

KATELYNN

May 31, 2020

1

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At home on the night of February 1, 2020... Hallelujah! I thought, when I first started writing the obituary. She’s dead. Finally! I’m free of her. Free! And, who is that her? Why, my mother of course.

It took me long enough to write the damn obituary, choking on every word, goaded on by my editorial committee, Aunts Agnes and Yolande. Finally got it done today, May 31. But I wasn’t choking from grief or sorrow, no, more from the sickening task of having to say nice things about her.

Your mother has been dead for weeks, Agnes called and bellowed for the umpteenth time. You have to get that obituary out. She was a member of a prominent family.

Every time I heard that, I remembered that phrase popular, was it in the ‘80s? Gag me with a spoon. Prominent family! Oh, it was true enough but what a burden it placed on us all.

You know, dear, some of my friends have been asking when they’ll see the obituary. Yolande was ten years younger than my mother and far more diplomatic than Agnes. Agnes was older than my mother by five years and the bossy boots of the family. By the time Abigail died, Agnes had been widowed for a number of years and I suspect she has too much time on her hands.

It’s easy enough for me to picture her, stomping around her palatial home, perched on a cliff on the Big Island, running her hands through her gray hair, now cut mannishly short, and fuming at me. Back in the day, Agnes’s hair had been a wavy auburn, a shade or two redder than the chestnut Abigail sported in her youth. Of course, by the time she died, Abigail had hardly any hair left and what she did have was a wispy white. I don’t look like either of them; I’m closer in looks to my late father and have the same shade of dark brown hair as he did. Also, both Agnes and Abigail towered over me, as I barely crack 5’5". I’m also half-heartedly fighting weight gain though 150 pounds isn’t a crime at 40, as I am.

Just about every line in that obituary stuck in my throat. Devoted wife of the late Montgomery Albert Joss.... Apparently, you have to write nice things about dead people, whether they are true or not, but there was zero real devotion between my parents. It would be more to the point to write distant, uncaring wife of.

I was in my teens before I started to notice how my parents lived separate lives in the same house. Now, I’d been aware of the distance as an older kid, but only after I went through puberty and they gave us rudimentary sex ed at school, did I discover something was off. Apparently, most married people shared a bedroom. And slept in the same bed!

But my father was so over-absorbed in his work that he hardly slept; he probably had insomnia, and my mother usually spoke to him only on the phone, calling him at the office and berating him, sometimes for hours. That was usually how she spent the first part of the afternoon each weekday and may have been one of the reasons he worked so late into the evenings, to make up for lost time. When I was older, I learned there were, maybe, other reasons...

Adored mother of her children. What a crock! I hadn’t put it that way, but over the phone lines came the directive: You have to write something nice about her, Yolande said. We chewed over the wording.

Absent mother of her children. I’d volunteered that, but not even Yolande would be persuaded. Yolande is usually more flexible than Agnes and looks quite different. Fair hair and gray eyes and a petite 5’2". Definitely one of the shorter members of the family Almost makes me think the Raddeford genes skipped her altogether, so unlike in looks is she to the rest of the family.

She was there. You can’t deny it. She didn’t work outside the home. She was at home, she was there, all the time you were growing up, she countered.

Okay, so at-home mother of her children?

No, that doesn’t tell anyone anything, was Yolande’s opinion. I actually thought it said a lot but didn’t point that out.

Okay, bed-addicted mother of her children...

Bed-addicted!!

Well, I could say bedridden but that suggests an illness was keeping her in bed.

Why do you even have to mention the bed?

That was where she spent her time. I paused. Then, what do you want me to say?

Well, you’ve already used ‘devoted’ for your father, so what about ‘adored’?

As in ‘adored mother’?

Yes.

Christ, Auntie! We didn’t adore her! Neither of us!

You must not speak ill of the dead, Yolande snapped back. Put it in. And then she hung up, so as to settle things.

It was Agnes who came after me about my brother Robitaille, whom we had always called Rob.

You can’t just put in she’s survived by her daughter Katelynn.

But it’s true Auntie, I’m here.

Yes, but that’s not what I mean.

"Well, what do you mean?"

Well, you know... Agnes was being coy. So unusual for her. You’d think she was discussing menstruation or some other taboo topic.

No, I don’t know, Auntie. You’ll have to spit it out.

Long silence. I knew what she was really after, but it was so much fun to play dumb.

Your brother.

What about him?

You don’t list him as a survivor.

But we don’t know where Rob is.

Well, you should include his name.

What, in the list of the predeceased?

Oh, God no. That would be inappropriate.

How do you know that? Maybe he is dead.

More silence. I felt the minutes pass. No comment from Agnes.

So, then, where? Again, I waited. I didn’t mind hanging on the phone in silence. Agnes had called me, from Hawaii, where she wintered each year. Her dime, not mine.

In the end, I left Rob out, not because I have anything against him. But because I literally don’t know if my brother is dead or alive.

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2

But let’s look more closely at those prominent Raddefords of Des Moines, Iowa or however you want to describe them. Oh, they were prominent all right. My maternal grandfather - always known as J. William - was born in 1900. The ‘J’ apparently stood for Job and he didn’t like it. He stopped using that name after an ugly post-Sunday school incident, where fists flew and best Sunday clothes were ripped, and where the other kids had taunted him. Wisdom of Job, Patience of Job, 900 years old Job. Not sure where they got it all from, as I doubt they’d read the Bible, but, as an eight-year-old, grandpa had stormed home and demanded to be known as Will from then on. So he was, unless the occasion was more formal, such as an obituary. Then he was referred to as J. William.

What about my maternal grandmother, the elusive Bertha Louise? Bertha was long gone from the family before I was born. But, no, not in the sense of being dead. Not then, she is now. She was born a Wilshaw in 1904. I’m not too certain how she connected with ol’ J. William but, let’s put it discreetly, Bertha may have come from the wrong side of the tracks. She also wasn’t an American but a Canadian which, back then, wasn’t a plus in some eyes. And, on top of that, she was already 30 when she married grandpa Raddeford. On the shelf. And, as nasty rumor had it, possibly used goods.

You don’t have to put in more than her name, Agnes back on the phone. Lord, her long-distance bill must be into the four digits by now. Unless she has a plan of some sort.

Well, what else would I put in Auntie? I don’t really know that much about grandma.

What a relief. Just stick to her name.

Oh, did I mention that Bertha disappeared, sometime in the 1960s, and was never formally acknowledged again by the Raddefords, although family legend has it that she regularly sent postcards, first from Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, and later from the Baja Peninsula?

But let’s get back to Grandpa Raddeford. He was the youngest son of - wait for it! - the ‘prominent Raddefords of Des Moines’ and, as such, had no real purpose in life. His older brother, Godfrey, ran the agribusiness holdings; the next son, Maurice, took over the construction business; son Karl was put in charge of the real estate holdings; and fourth son Walter became the industrialist, managing all the manufactories as they used to be known. J. William had a younger sister Marilla, born in 1906, but they married her off at 20 to another local industrialist, so she was out of the way. Can’t imagine what my Raddeford great-grandparents were thinking of, but maybe they looked around one day and said: Shit, we didn’t save anything for J. William to run. Well, it’s unlikely they would have used the S-word but the rest must have been close to the truth.

So, they set up a trust fund for J. William and, with a pat on the back and a peck on the cheek, shooed him out of the nest, which if you’re ever down Des Moines way, was a fairly impressive pile. In fact, all the Raddeford homes are on the National Register, and include at least one American Queen Anne-style (belonged to the great-greats, I believe), a couple of Spanish Eclectics, a couple of Second Empires and, I recall, a Colonial Revival. I think a cousin also lived in a Prairie School Style manse of some sort. Grand Avenue, High Street, Terrace Hill, Kinsey Avenue - all the correct addresses – the Raddeford real estate is all there.

So, dashing in looks but dissipated in all else, J. William began a life of instability, dabbling first with bogus inventions, then coal-fired airplanes, illicit chemistry, UFO monitoring, and more. It was during his many dabblings he met Bertha Louise and they ended up marrying in 1934. I have no idea which dabbling brought them together. And it may not have been one of the dabblings at all. After all, Agnes was born in 1935. Perhaps she hastened the nuptials along...?

I hope that is all you are going to say about Bertha and J. William, Agnes, back at it, after reading my fourteenth draft. Up until this point, I’d had to fax them to her but I think the amount of paper the drafts chewed up was what persuaded Agnes to sign up for the Internet. It was around this point in time that we switched to using email attachments for her reviews.

Yep, that’s about it.

A long, long pause. See that phone bill rise! See the phone company’s profits soar! And then Agnes opines: Good and hangs up.

Of course, what she didn’t see is what I would’ve liked to add about good ol’ Bertha Louise. One thing being why my mother, of the prominent Des Moines Raddefords no less, had been born in Abbotsford BC of all places. Now, I’ve never been there, it’s probably a nice little burg, but Bertha Louise was there when the contractions started. Or so she told me.

It took a while to track her down. I managed to visit her, at the gallant age of 95, still living in the commune in the Baja. That was back in 1999, when I was 19. In truth, I had a bit of help in finding Bertha Louise. Seems my Great Aunt Marilla had kept in touch with her and, back in the late ‘60s, when Bertha Louise did her final runner to get away from J. William, she gave Great Aunt Marilla a forwarding address. Seems Marilla even went to visit, several times. Her husband, Wallace Kremberg, was dead by then and Marilla was loaded, so she began a series of travel adventures.

Loved it down there, she told me about the commune. I’d gone to visit her in her Manhattan apartment, an elegant place on the Upper West Side. Her building was not far from The Dakota and other spots where luminaries like Lauren Bacall and John Lennon had once lived.

I was 17 at the time I went to New York City to be with GAM, as I called Marilla, who was still tall like all the Raddefords but thin and bony, covered in age spots and wearing her hair in a brush cut. They hadn’t known what to do with me during the March break that year, so they packed me off to Manhattan. That was the trip where I learned GAM smoked pot. Perhaps that was why she lived so long.

Oh, Bertha used to be my supplier, back in Des Moines, my 91-year-old GAM told me with great cheer, her rake-thin body sprawled on the floor, head of iron-gray hair on her Philippe Starck couch. I sat, drinking all this in, not sure what to say. I mean, what are you supposed to say when an elder blurts something like that out?

They have really great dope down there at the commune, Marilla went on. Not sure if they grow it or buy it, but it is the best.

And that’s why you visit so often? I decided to venture a question.

You could say that, Katelynn, at which GAM had given me a Cheshire cat smile and gone off into her dope-drenched dreaming. Oh, did I mention she’d share a toke with me, which at the time, seemed super-cool to a 17-year-old and gave me great prestige back at school.

What did you do at March break, Katie? Wendy - worst bitch at Bishop Strachan School and knowing I hated to be called Katie - had asked. Expecting to hear about some run-of-the-mill ski trip to Switzerland.

Oh, just hung out in Manhattan, smoking dope, I said and walked away. Wendy gave me a wide berth after that, as if I might contaminate her holier-than-thou reputation.

But back to Bertha Louise. At the age of 64, in 1968, well beyond conventional hippie age, she’d taken to the lifestyle. She was well preserved, an advantage of money, so likely could fit in, with a lithe yoga-toned body and still sporting her natural black hair color. Seems the crowd she hung out with in the Haight had splintered. Some remained in San Francisco to open tea parlors and ‘head shops’ as the hippies called them, while the rest had moseyed down the coast over a period of five or so years, reaching the Baja in 1972. Not sure who came up with the cash to buy the property, maybe Bertha Louise herself, but they actually bought some land and did market gardening, raising crops to sell. Bertie, as they all called her, spent most of her time cooking - a surprise, given that no Raddeford, whether by birth or marriage, ever voluntarily performed that task in the past - but likely Bertie had learned the skill prior to joining the clan.

I actually like cooking, she told me. But, as J. William’s wife, I wasn’t supposed to do that. Bertie was barely over 5 feet tall, making us of a size. I really could see eye-to-eye with her. An unusual feeling for me. By this point, she had white hair which she wore in a big fat braid down her back, and any time I saw her, she was barefoot.

Even worse, our cook never took a day off or, if she did, she left casseroles we could heat up. It’s one of the reasons I left J. William and flew the coop, and joined the commune. I’m allowed to cook.

And that’s it?

No. She’d winked at me, then: There are other reasons.

Oh, like GAM, it’s the dope? I’d volunteered.

The dope? Is that what she told you? And with that, Bertie had howled with laughter.

I stood, puzzled. She looked at me and said: How old are you now?

Nineteen, I said.

Well, then, you’re old enough, she’d winked.

That’s how I found out why GAM kept going back to the commune and why Bertie stayed. Sex! Lots and lots, with whoever they wanted. Mainly doped-up younger guys. They put me in a room with three guys younger than me and we rolled ‘n rocked all night and most of the next day, sleeping fitfully. Several times I woke to find myself full of cock, reaching orgasm and then drifting back to sleep. At least, that’s what I think I recall but, who knows, maybe it was just a dope-saturated dream? Maybe we were too stoned to do more than dream about sex?

Now, I wasn’t a virgin when this happened. I had taken care of that two years prior in a functional and boring coupling with some kid at a mixer dance, arranged by my all-girls school with