It Happened To Me: My Boss Died At 36 Leaving Me Responsible For Her Fraudulent Business And Messy Life
What do you do when someone you barely know or like dies and cleaning up their problems all falls on you? Also: why was I her emergency contact??
Hello lovely people!
The way I got today’s It Happened To Me story is the way I hope you will consider sending me yours: Emma emailed me at Jane@AnotherJanePrattThing.com with a version of this headline and I asked her to write it up. Then the fun began (for me) of editing the story, gathering photos and captions, finding pullquotes and about 20 exchanges between us later, here is Emma’s piece. I love her sassy and non-reverential approach to talking about the deceased, for one thing. (Emma is also $50 wealthier - woohoo - and you know why? Because a disproportionate number of you pay to subscribe, which I am beyond grateful for. I was interviewed recently and the journalist mentioned the percentage of AJPT subscribers he presumed were paying and I had to say no it was at least 3 times that. And those fees all go to these writers, so thank you on their and my behalves. It also warms my heart when you become paying subscribers while reading a free post, just because we asked and just because you are good. Thank you, Maureen - most recently - and others!!!!)
Before you read today’s featured piece, I want to point out that there is a tangential moment in the story that may be upsetting or jarring to cat-lovers (aren’t we all?), but I left it in because it is real life and I think worth talking about. Tell me if you disagree with my judgment call.
And finally, if you care about what Happened To Me between the last time I wrote you and today: I got to dance for hours with my BFF (and AJPT contributor!) to a performance of his music and then hear him get up and sing some of it too. I was the only person there who had known him while he was writing all of those songs and it was trippy and thrilling. I was high as an adrenalized kite and we couldn’t stop talking for at least three hours after. His voice was better than ever. Getting older is awesome. I cried.
I love you and I will talk to you more (if you want to) in the comments.
xo Jane (By the way, if you happen to have heard of that website named XOJane, I never actually signed things that way. Our boss Troy just made that up because he thought it looked good.)
PS For those (ten?) of you who are following my recent Celine wallet predicament, I reunited with the friend this week! I will fill you in more in the comments because I know you just can’t live without this major update.
MY BOSS DIED, LEAVING ME IN CHARGE OF HER FRAUDULENT NON-PROFIT AND MESSY LIFE
By Emma Margraf
For a while, it was a job I loved. I was Director of Special Projects for a non-profit dedicated to volunteer service, and I had a wide berth: I led fifty people in a flash mob– a choreographed dance in the middle of a main street in our town to Take a Chance on Me by ABBA, organized a Day of Service for an entire middle school to honor Martin Luther King, and ran something called the Economic Survival Fair, where folks could find every helpful resource I could muster under one roof for a day. Every month I led a large, fun, chaotic community project and I loved it. Until it started to fall apart.
The work appealed to me as a veteran of a progressive Catholic school; it was service work with a thread of whimsy. Plus my boss loved me, and loved that I was a foster parent. I knew there were people who didn’t like her, but I didn’t know why and I didn’t see it. But a few years in, I did see something new. My boss started to turn on people she used to love. She became angry and her anger became explosive. There was something clearly wrong with her but anyone who tried to get close enough to find out what it was regretted it. Over the course of a few months, most of the staff were laid off. All we were told was that we’d lost most of our funding and that the three of us who remained were the three that she deemed most capable of helping her raise money to keep this twenty-four year old non-profit afloat.
I was navigating between admonishing staff who were singing “ding-dong the witch is dead” and confiding in friends how uncomfortable I felt in this situation.
She spent several weeks screaming at us before she stopped coming into the office. She didn’t respond when I asked her if she was ok. She started to not respond to me at all. Our remaining staff were left in our offices at one end of a long and lonely hallway. The only sight of her we had was on Fridays, when she would pull up in front of the building to take our developmentally delayed volunteer receptionist out to lunch. The only communication we had was through emails she was sending to whomever she was speaking to at the moment. I remember feeling relieved when that was me.
I knew I wasn’t handling this well. I knew I had to leave, but I was so hesitant to leave a job I loved and thought maybe this was a temporary situation. I was at a friend’s house discussing the state of my life when I got a text from my boss’s landlord. She’d apparently listed me as her emergency contact and they were out of town, but their housesitter saw my boss get taken away in an ambulance. They wanted to know if she was ok.
She’s definitely not ok.
Why am I her emergency contact?!
I’m the worst person on earth. Get it together.
The second hospital I called told me that my boss was in the ICU, and that they could give me no more information. I got chills down my spine. I called our board chair, who said he would see if he could get more information and call me back. I waited. I couldn’t think of anyone else to call.
There was nothing I could do, so my friend and I made a lemon meringue pie. It was a nicely complicated thing to focus on and for that I was grateful. Right as it was going into the fridge to set, my phone rang.
My board chair had just gotten off the phone with my boss’s parents, who were getting on a plane to make a cross country flight to come to our town. They were informed by the hospital that my boss had a blood clot that led to an aneurysm, and was in critical condition.
They took her off life support the next day. She was 36. I told the staff while we all sat in my office eating lemon meringue pie straight out of the tin. None of us knew what to think or what to say. Fortunately, my friend also sent along a key lime pie.
I worried about what I would say to her parents if no one came to her memorial service.
We posted an announcement, and my phone started ringing off the hook. Our town was shaken by the loss of this young leader and we were the only ones aware of her decline. It felt like everyone wanted to talk to me, including my boss’s landlord, who wanted to know if I could tell him who would be responsible for her belongings, and her cats.
None of those calls were from friends of hers, but my boss’s elderly and very nice parents were asking whether we were going to have a funeral, and there was the issue of these cats.
A Facebook group devoted to “saving” her cats was formed. which suddenly had hundreds of members, but no volunteers. These animals were elderly and sick and likely never going to become happy and healthy again. So friends decided to put them down and lie to the Facebook people about it.
Meanwhile, the board asked me to be the acting director of the organization and funders were calling….
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