Chapter 1

Well, I am not likely to live for much longer because I’m in my nineties now and there have been a large number of hard miles on my body. I’m not yet ready for hospice care, but that is due to the number of women who take very good care of this old fart. I would rather die at home than to die in one of those places. I’m just glad that I was able to last long enough to finish writing my last story and posting it here on SOL. My wives liked it and I hope you will like it also.

This is essentially an autobiography. Throughout my life I maintained what I think of as my diary, which was actually multiple diaries that covered different periods of my life. While writing this story, I referred to my diary to prompt my memory.

I apologize in advance if you find the timeline of the story confusing. The confusion is the result of my negotiating with myself about my two proclivities. My first trait is to tell a story in chronological order. The second trait is to complete a series of related events before starting to address another event.

While I was proofreading the story, I realized my having included the dates and days of the events was causing me some confusion. I knew that if I was becoming confused, my readers would also be confused, and their confusion would probably be worse than mine. So I deleted the dates from the story. I left the references to some of the days of the week in the story, where I felt it was important. Then I moved some of the events around. So if the sequencing of events is confusing because they seem to overlap, that is because they do overlap. I apologize for my proclivities creating this situation.

Before I go further, I really should tell you who I am, or rather who I was, for my physical appearance has changed a lot during the past twenty some years. My name is Kenneth Hawk and most people call me Ken. At the time this story begins, I was seventy years old, five foot ten inches tall, two hundred and five pounds when nude, and retired from a mid-level accounting position in a large corporation. I had thick medium brown hair that was thinning on top, which is commonly referred to as male-pattern baldness. I would say I was average in looks and reasonably healthy and physically fit for an old fart. If you saw me, you would not think of me as having an athletic build or being very muscular. Back then, I was a slightly overweight old fart, but that is just my opinion. Most of the people I knew laughed when I described myself that way. Probably a nervous reaction because it was true.

I wasn’t always an old fart, it came upon me gradually. I can’t pinpoint exactly when it started, but I’ve felt like an old fart since my wife Betty’s death. She was sixty six years old when she passed away.

Betty had trouble sleeping for many years. My snoring didn’t help and neither did my leaky CPAP mask, which I stopped using after Betty’s death. My shifting my position in bed at night would break the seal on the full-face mask and result in face farts. She would poke me almost every night and tell me to fix my mask.

A couple of years after my daughter, Nancy, divorced her husband, she and my granddaughter, Karen, moved in and lived with Betty and me. A few years later, Nancy bought a townhouse, and they moved in there. After that, Betty decided to sleep alone in Nancy’s former bedroom. Even when she slept alone, Betty frequently woke up at two or three in the morning and sat in the living room before going back to bed, which I understand is a common trait of elderly people.

On such a night, Betty would sometimes remain in bed asleep until 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning. If I didn’t sleep in, I would usually wake up about 5:00 or a little earlier. I would start the coffee, and have a cup or two until Betty woke up and joined me in the front room. We would sit in our recliners, drink coffee, and talk about our plans for the day before eating breakfast. That was how we would start our day’s activities, not that we had a lot to do. Since retiring, our activities were mostly gardening and yardwork, cleaning up the kitchen, picking up after ourselves, housework, washing clothes, shopping, putting groceries away, and fixing meals. I’m a fair cook, so Betty and I took turns cooking, and we helped each other with the remaining tasks.

One Saturday morning, I was on my third cup of coffee when I realized it was almost 8:30 and Betty was still in bed. That was very unusual for her, so I quietly slipped into her bedroom to check on her. That was when I learned that sometime during the night she had passed away.

I called 9-1-1 to report her death and to request a paramedic or whoever normally responded to a situation like this. What my call got me was a policewoman and a man who introduced himself as a Deputy Coroner. I’m no longer certain about minor details like titles, so his title may have been Assistant Coroner. It took them longer to respond than I thought it should.

Then I called my daughter and granddaughter. Breaking the news to them was traumatic for all three of us. Neither Betty, our girls, nor I were close to our other family members and relatives, so I would let them know later. At least I would call those we were still talking to. I didn’t care about the rest of our relatives for they had made it clear to us that they didn’t care very much for Betty, me, or our girls. The feeling was mutual.

Karen still lived at her mother’s townhouse while attending university, so when I called Karen answered the phone. I told her to call her mom and put the phone on speaker, so they could both hear me. When I heard Nancy’s voice saying “Hi, Dad”, I broke the bad news to them. I could hear them crying, sobbing, and repeatedly saying “Oh No!” and a few similar things.

I could tell that Betty’s death was a major shock for them, as it was for me. After a couple of minutes, Nancy said, “Dad, we need to get dressed and we will be over right away.”

I said to them, “Take your time, girls, and don’t rush. There is nothing we can do for Betty now that would change matters. Drive carefully and I’ll be here when you arrive.”

At the time, it didn’t occur to me that they were coming over to take care of me. Nancy and Karen arrived while I was explaining to the policewoman what Betty and I had done since yesterday afternoon. When my girls arrived, I suddenly had both arms full of crying women who were holding onto me as if I was going to run away. That was not something I was accustomed to dealing with, but I did my best.

While I was trying to comfort Nancy and Karen, I saw the Deputy Coroner talking to the policewoman. Evidently, he told the deputy there did not appear to be any foul play and Betty’s death was most likely heart failure, which is what was later listed on Betty’s death certificate as the cause of death.

The officer had been treating me respectfully, but I had noticed a bit of skepticism in her voice and body language. Once my girls had a bit of control over their emotions and let me move away from them, I resumed my explanation to the police woman. At that point, I sensed a large measure of sympathy in the policewoman’s voice and body language. I think it was partly due to the officer being a middle-aged woman who had undoubtedly been through this before. It had to be a stressful situation to calmly talk to a man in a respectful manner when you thought he may have killed his wife.

Nancy and Karen were still distraught with grief. That was understandable, but I don’t handle other people’s emotions very well. I tried to be supportive of them. I think I did a fair job of that, considering that I was dealing with my own grief and feelings of loss. The officer did her best to help me comfort my girls, and in the process, she also comforted me. Eventually, Betty was wheeled out on a gurney, which was lifted into the coroner’s van. He left and the officer left a short time later.

Nancy called her office and arranged for a week off from work and Karen stayed home from school, so they could be with me and support me. I’m not sure who was comforting and supporting whom. It seemed about equal to me. After the second day of us comforting and supporting each other, they agreed that it was time to return to work and school.

For me, the next four weeks were spent dealing with the many things that had to be taken care of when you lose a loved one. I was just trying to get through losing Betty and really wasn’t paying attention to what else was happening in the world around me. So, I wasn’t aware of a local situation that occurred during that period.

During the first two days, I made arrangements for the cremation of Betty’s remains, but there would be no funeral at a cemetery. Actually, our local funeral parlor’s manager contacted me to see if there was anything he could do in my time of need. I suspected the funeral parlor’s manager had a contact in the coroner’s office who reported the death of people living in the local area to him for I hadn’t gotten around to putting an obituary in the paper. I did that a few days later. They were probably as good as the other funeral parlors, so I agreed to use them. They weren’t cheap, but they did do a good job in helping us through our period of grief.

Nancy, Karen, I, and a few close friends of my wife held a private viewing at the funeral home. I had been a lone wolf most of my life, and had almost no friends. All of my real friends were from my time in the Army and those who were still with us lived out of state. I didn’t bother contacting them for they barely knew Betty. After the cremation of Betty’s remains, Nancy, Karen, and I privately disposed of her cremains one evening at a local park that she loved.

We didn’t make a big deal of it for the city had passed an ordinance prohibiting what we did, but our bottom line was that we weren’t hurting anyone or anything, and we didn’t care what the city wanted. It was what my wife wanted that mattered to us. She wanted her ashes scattered in the park, so we would scatter her ashes in the park and keep that fact to ourselves.

We just walked around the park one evening with three small bags of her cremains and we would occasionally scatter a handful of cremains across the grass. I don’t recall seeing anyone at the park that evening, but we were worried about being caught. I think that was the first time I or my girls intentionally disregarded the law.

After that, I dealt with the legal matters associated with the death of a family member. Our family lawyer, Richard (Rich) Wells, handled the reading of her will and the disposition of her estate. He also told me I would need at least a dozen copies of her death certificate for the officials I would be dealing with. So I was ready when everyone wanted an original copy of her death certificate; a Xerox copy wasn’t good enough for them because their copy had to have the embossed seal. I considered it to be a stupid rule that was probably made by the city so they could charge you for something that wasn’t really necessary.

I won’t go into the details of all the difficulties we had with greedy relatives, and matters relating to Betty’s former employer, the SSA, her IRA, Medicare, our investments, and other things.

I was in the last stage of finalizing everything I had to do, when I pulled into a gas station to fill up my car’s gas tank. I usually do that when the fuel gauge hits a quarter of a tank. I paid for the gas with my credit card, like I always did. While paying the cashier, I decided to buy a lottery ticket. I frequently bought lottery tickets before Betty’s death, but this was the first time I wanted to do so since her death. I knew the odds of winning any appreciable amount of money were against me, but as I always said, “You can’t win, if you don’t play.”

I was in the process of pulling a twenty dollar bill out of my wallet to pay for the ten quick picks, when, I noticed the last lottery ticket I had bought was still in my wallet. Due to all the chaos I had gone through since Betty’s death, I had forgotten that I had bought the ticket. So I put my new ticket in my wallet with my old ticket, and headed home.

As usual, I didn’t really expect to win anything major, so I wasn’t in a rush to check the numbers on my earlier ticket. I decided to just wait until after the next drawing had occurred to check the numbers on both of my tickets.

The next morning, I decided it was time to start going through Betty’s belongings and dispose of what I no longer wanted to keep. I knew that would be a depressing task, so I wasn’t in a rush to complete it. That task took me more than two weeks to complete. At times, I wanted to just stop and do the rest later, but I persevered to get it over with, although I did take a lot of short coffee breaks.

Betty’s clothes wouldn’t fit Nancy or Karen, so they went to Goodwill. The majority of Betty’s memorabilia from her life before we met didn’t mean anything to Nancy, Karen, or me, so it went to either the Goodwill or the dump. I did keep a few items that were meaningful to either me or my girls. Except for the pieces of jewelry that meant something to me, I gave my wife’s jewelry to Karen whose taste in jewelry was very similar to Betty’s. Nancy had very different tastes in jewelry, but I did give her a couple of items that she wanted to have because they reminded her of her mother.

I had essentially completed the disposition of Betty’s belongings, when one evening I was on my computer and noticed an article on my MSN news feed about an unclaimed winning Lottery ticket that had been sold in San Diego over three months ago. It was then that I remember that I hadn’t checked the numbers on my two Lottery tickets. I decided to read the story before checking the numbers.

The article got my hopes up. The single winning ticket for a jackpot of over four hundred million dollars had been sold at the liquor store where I normally bought my alcoholic beverages. I had almost always bought a Lottery ticket when I was there.

I couldn’t recall exactly when or where I had purchased the earlier ticket in my wallet, but I didn’t delay any longer. I checked my tickets and learned that I was the winner of the jackpot prize. My most recent ticket was good for two dollars, which was more than I usually won on a ten-pick ticket. I was stunned and just sat in my chair looking at my monitor and my winning ticket to make sure I hadn’t misread something. I hadn’t.

I signed the ticket, scanned both sides of the ticket, put the ticket in a Ziploc bag, and then put the bag in my home safe. I also made printouts of the scans and put them in the safe with the ticket. The ticket and printouts would be secure in my fireproof safe until I could decide what to do with my winnings. I still had almost three months to submit the ticket, so I wanted to take care of a couple of matters first.

My home safe was one of those large fireproof Well Fargo safes that stood about four feet tall that I had bought for our valuables and important papers. Some of Betty’s jewelry was valuable, so she kept it in the safe.

At the time we bought Betty’s expensive jewelry, the jewelry store told us that jewelry was a good investment. We later learned we would be lucky to get twenty percent of what we paid for it, if we sold it back to the jeweler. By selling it ourselves, we might get up to about sixty percent of the purchase price.

Yeah, I wanted a plan before the media descended on me ... not to mention the people who would want to sell me something or would want me to invest my money in their business. I knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid the media.

On SOL, I had read many of the rags-to-riches stories. In fact, I had written and posted a few of those stories. One of the good ideas I recalled from the stories I read was the MC referring everyone who wanted something from him to his lawyer. I decided to visit Rich as soon as I could get an appointment and make arrangements with him to do the same thing.

Two days later, I was sitting in a chair with Rich on the other side of his desk. I said, “Rich, I need advice, but I also need you to keep what I tell you a secret for the time being. Two days ago, I got around to checking a lottery ticket I had forgotten that I bought. I found out that I’ve won that four hundred million dollar jackpot.”

Rich was stunned. Once he grasped what I had told him, he said, “I know why you want to keep it secret, Ken. Have you made any plans for collecting on the ticket and what type of advice do you need?”

“I made a few decisions about the money, Rich. Since learning that I won the jackpot, I decided to take the cash payout and I’ve made a few tentative plans for what to do with the money.

“I think you read the story I posted on SOL about winning the lottery. Well in researching that story, I learned that the cash payout percentage varies. So I used the lottery’s payout calculator and entered four hundred million dollars. I know the currently published amount is higher than that, but I’m using that amount for planning purposes. The Lottery’s calculated cash payout amount was about two hundred and four million. Then I checked the IRS tax rate for that amount of money and learned my tax bill would be thirty seven percent of my net income. I deducted my estimated tax bill from the cash payout amount and arrived at an after tax amount of about a hundred and twenty eight million dollars. I intend to use that amount for planning purposes.”

“Damn, Ken. That’s a lot less than four hundred million.”

“Yeah, I know, but it is far more than I am likely to need for the rest of my life.

What I plan to do is allocate the money to several ... well, I call them boxes. I haven’t figured out the precise number of boxes or the amount to allocate to each box. However, I know I’m going to need a good financial advisor to handle all of this, so if you know of someone let me know.”

“I recommend my advisor, Paul Dawkins. I think he is one of the better advisors I and my clients have worked with.”

“Okay, I’ll check him out.

“Right now, I have six boxes defined. Box 1 is for my living expenses for the next ten years. I was thinking of three million dollars for that box with two hundred thousand of that deposited to my checking and saving’s accounts. I want a hundred thousand deposited to each account and I’ll put the rest of Box 1’s funds in a money market account. I’ll also apply for the bank’s unlimited credit card account, so I won’t have to worry about credit card limits.

“For Boxes 2 and 3, I’m thinking of creating two trust accounts for Nancy and Karen with at least twenty million in each box. I’ll have you set up the trusts for me.