YOU AND YOUR AFFAIRS

Laughter bubbles up inside me. Inappropriate giggles threatening to spill out all over the table and all your financial papers. Your executor has just asked me if you were married more than once. For some reason all I can think of is finding out, while settling my brother's estate (a misnomer, estate really, but never mind) that his Decree Nisi was lifted and declared Decree Final, shortly before he died. This was only two years ago so it's still fresh in my mind. We had no idea, none of us, that he had ever even been married. Now he was dead and we were learning his divorce was final. To think of my mother having another husband is so beyond the pale, I think I might start chortling and not be able to stop. The executor thinks he's insulted us, says he's required by law to ask. I cannot look at my husband. I'm not sure why it is so funny. It just is.