The muddling through....

Sat, 05 Feb 2005 23:55:05 GMT

I was prompted to start a journal by running into a post by a user called Feedle. I guess a good first entry will just paste it.... but I might need this outlet, I thought as I let loose in this reply:

I just found this post by Googling "dealing with my parents' house".

My mom died this past May, and my dad last November -- Mom followed Dad exactly two days shy of six months. I moved back to my hometown a year before my dad's death, and I put almost all my own stuff in storage and moved into their house when my mom died. I've spent the last -- god, can it really be eight months? -- living here as if they're on vacation and I'm housesitting. The annoying Sheltie, Penny, and I are getting along pretty well, and I kept my dad's car and sold mine, so the driveway even looks the same. I've cleaned out some closets, sure, and moved in the cats, and been ten times the slob either of my parents might have mustered on their worst day... but it's still, almost exactly, my childhood home.

Two weeks ago I quit my job in order to deal with it all... and I've spent most of my time on the couch, watching VH1 and thinking, "Tomorrow."

And today, finally, became tomorrow... and I'm completely overwhelmed. I'm single, and childless, and the only child of two only children. Today, I counted five sets of heirloom silver -- Mom and Dad inherited everything from their parents, and there's just no distribution network. No cousins. No aunts. No family at all, and I just don't get how in the hell I'm supposed to do this.

There's a gossamer christening dress in a drawer, with a sepia photograph of my mother's father being baptized in 1908.

There are envelopes of my mother's hair, cracking and yellowing with age,and labelled, in my maternal grandmother's straighforward hand, with the date they were snipped from my mom's curly auburn head. (Yvonne Carol Hoff. First haircut. June 6, 1939.)

There's a series of silver dollars, the first dated 1966, the year of my birth, and the last 1979, the year I first kissed a boy. I learned from my father how to abandon projects mid-stream, when something more entertaining presented itself, and I think I know that the odd coined dollar was his way of saving a year of my childhood, forgotten when it wasn't relevant anymore.

There's a hand-painted glass from the 1933 World's Fair. There's a piece of the first transatlantic cable. There's the ugly dinner service I grew up hating, and there are four lovely, delicate ones that were saved 'for good.' There're the crystal wine glasses I gave my mom and dad for their last anniversary -- their 46th -- because I got sick of bringing good wine and drinking from bad glasses. There's a photograph I've never seen before, a newspaper clipping, of my startled-looking high-school mother holding up her prize-winning "Hire handicapped veterans" poster in a high-school competition, made the more poignant by her stories of discouragement when she tried to paint in college. And there are also the untouched watercolors and canvas and gesso I gave her as a gift on her very last birthday, weeks before she died.

And all this stuff --- stuff, per George Carlin -- is mine now. And it's remarkable that stuff can so confound me, so puzzle and paralyze me. I suppose I'll just work through it... a piece, a memory, a regret at a time... and I'll know I own it. And I'll know I mourn it. And I'll know I'm grateful for it.

Thanks for sharing your experience. I needed to share mine, and yours prompted me.

aimlessm

The muddling through....