As readers of this here blog know, my mother passed away last October at the age of 90. Friends keep asking me if I'm all right, if I'm consumed with sorrow, etc. Easy answer: I'm fine with it. Honest. I miss her…but I missed so many things about her while she was alive. For the last decade or so, I missed her being able to walk more than a few steps at a time and even those required a walker. I missed being able to take her to places she loved. I missed her being able to read or cook or do any of a dozen other things that once brought her pleasure. The last six months, I really missed her not being in the hospital and not being deeply depressed about her condition. If you miss a person that much when they're still alive, it's hard to miss them more after they die.
There are so many obits on this site that I get the occasional e-mail from someone asking for tips on how to cope with grief. I'm only an expert on what works for me…and what works for me is this: Just getting on with things, resuming normal activities and not feeling I have to make myself physically or emotionally ill to prove I cared about the departed. After all, you're going to get there eventually. Why not just go there now?
Given her physical ailments and constant hospitalizations, it's not like my mother's death was a surprise…or that there wasn't an aspect of relief about it. She was only months (and not many months) from being totally blind and requiring 24/7 care. She wanted very much to go before those things happened and I'm sure that for the most part, she was glad she did. So I could take comfort in the timing, plus I had all those things to do: Papers to file, calls to make, her house to take care of. This past weekend, I think I checked the last thing off that list.
As I mentioned here earlier — here, for instance, and later here — I decided to sell her house, the house I grew up in. The process was pretty simple. I determined who the top realtors were in that area…the ones who really knew the neighborhood and were selling homes there. I selected five and interviewed each (plus one couple who crashed the interviews) and made my selection. I do not think I would have gone terribly wrong with any of the five but that's a hunch. I know I didn't go wrong with the guy I chose.
His name is Chad Lund. If you ever want to buy or sell a home near where I grew up, here's his website.
I've written here in the past of the beauty I find in anyone who does what they do about as well as it can be done. Usually, I'm talking about great jugglers or great dancers or great comic book inkers…but hey, why not great realtors? Chad told me what he would do and it was all within the range of Possible. As a person who likes reality in his financial dealings, I appreciated that he did not promise to get me an unreachable price. I also appreciated the attention. He sells houses at about the same pace I knock off blog posts but always had the time 'n' patience to explain everything to me and to answer what must have been some very naïve, repetitive questions.
It would have been easy to dog it once he had the listing. The house was going to sell no matter what he did…and it's not like he needed to impress me with his efficiency so I'd let him sell other homes I grew up in. I just had the one. Still, I was impressed with how "in control" he was of the process and how even after selling as many dwellings as he's sold, he's not bored with it all and sloughing off the details. He got back to me in a flash every time I called and everything worked out pretty much the way he said it would.
Can't ask for better than that.
A very nice family purchased the place. I'm going to go over there later this week with some old photos I have and explain to them all the history they can stand. They've invited me to come back any time if I want to see what they've done with it…and I may change my mind but I don't think I do.
It stopped being my house — or even my mother's house — around 6 PM, last Saturday. Legally, it stopped belonging to anyone named Evanier the previous Wednesday when escrow closed but I still had things to get out, mostly for friends. Carolyn got my mother's dresser and a desk (the kind they call a "secretary") in the living room. My assistant Darcie got the dresser from the back bedroom… the dresser my mother bought to put in there after I moved out of that room with all my comic books. My mother's (and my) former cleaning lady Dora got her refrigerator. My former assistant Tracy got the old paintings in the garage and a wonderful old egg beater. My mother's friend Karen who lives next door and kept an eye on her got an area rug and her cat cookie jar. My friend John the architect, who helped her often, got her old O'Keefe & Merritt stove.
While John was picking up the stove, he met the new owners and I think they're going to hire him to design some new rooms, including perhaps a second story they hope to add. I like that, just as I know my mother would like that Carolyn had her dresser, Dora had her refrigerator, etc. Nothing big went to people she didn't know and a few pieces of her house, like that great urn she had out in the front patio, are now parts of my house.
I hired two men and a big truck on Saturday to deliver many of those items to their recipients and once they were all distributed, I felt like a large chapter of my life was over. And the last dangling matter undangled itself yesterday when I received a check from Time-Warner Cable. It took months to persuade them to cancel her cable TV account and months more to get them to refund fees they'd charged her after she had passed. It was actually easier to get her two banks to acknowledge her death and do what had to be done than it was to get Time-Warner to stop billing her for HBO.
Not long after she died, a well-meaning friend offered me some advice. Noting that I was not consumed by grief, she predicted I would be once the paperwork was done and I'd checked off the last item on my "Things to Do Because My Mother Died" list. She said, "Now, all that stuff is busy work and it redirects your mind from your loss. When it's all done, there'll come a moment when it'll hit you." Well, it's all done and no such moment arrived. Instead, there was a sense of relief that I was finished with that…and a sense of gratitude to my mother for setting it up as neatly as she did. A lady at one of her banks looked over the paperwork my mother had left and said, "I've never seen anyone prepare so neatly and make it so easy for the person in your position."
That was how it worked with us. She took care of me for the first part of my life and then the responsibilities reversed and I took care of her for the last part of hers. Then after she died, we kind of took care of each other.