When Gramp and Gram moved to a residential care facility.
When my grandparents moved from their two-story five-bedroom house to a residential care facility, the kids and grandkids came in to deal with all their stuff. At some point my dad got a call from Gramp.
“In the bedroom closet there’s a walrus penis.”
Gramp was a paleontologist — among many other hobbies — and he had a petrified walrus penis bone, or penis bone fragment, about two feet long. It looked like a stone dildo. For reasons that seemed obvious to him, he had not left it out on the display shelf with the other bones and artifacts.
My parents got to keep it. Last I knew it was on one of their shelves somewhere, presumably still not on the display shelf with the other objects. I got a skull that Gramp had preserved when he was in medical school, which is its own kind of bequest.
The call had the casual confidence of a man who had never considered that “there’s a walrus penis in the bedroom closet” might be unexpected information. He had acquired it; he had stored it appropriately; now it needed to be moved; here are the facts. Gramp delivered this the way he delivered most information: directly, with the expectation that you would handle it.