Inside the church, the office phone started to ring, and Mrs. Kemper stopped talking, because the state funeral board was calling her at the fellowship hall, about the prepaid plan she cashed out of my grandmothers file in 2021.
For years the Kempers treated my calling like a shame and my grandmothers money like their own. This time the truth came from the funeral home, because Mr. Hollins found the file.
My grandmother bought an eleven-thousand-dollar prepaid funeral plan in 2015, and when she died the family was told it had been canceled and we paid out of pocket, but the plan was never canceled, it was cashed out in 2021 by Doris Kemper, using a power of attorney nobody knew she had over my grandmother.
The copy of the contract was in my trunk, Doris Kempers signature on the payout. Mr. Hollins slid the file across his desk and showed me: the woman who called my calling a sin had quietly emptied my grandmothers funeral fund years before she died, then let us pay for the funeral all over again.
Mrs. Kemper threw my embalming textbook in the church dumpster and told me death is not a career, that it is a sin to make money off grief. She did not know the state funeral board was already calling the church office about the grief she had made money off of.
Gary put down his chairs and asked what this was about. I told him to ask his mother about Grandmas plan.
I did not stay. I drove home, studied from a library copy, and Monday I passed my national board exam, because Mrs. Kemper could throw out a textbook but not two years at Hollins and Sons.
I am a licensed funeral director now, working alongside Mr. Hollins, the man whose kindness put me on this path. The cashed-out plan is with the state board and a lawyer, on paper, where death isnt a career does not help Doris Kemper, and my grandmothers eleven thousand dollars is being recovered for her estate.
Gary, when he understood what his mother did to my grandmother, went quiet in a way I had never seen. He is the one who told me to keep the recovered money and put it toward my own shop someday.
Its a sin to make money off grief, she told me. She would know. And Mrs. Kemper stopped talking before the office phone finished its first ring, because the file she thought no one would ever read told the truth on her.